This is a poll begun by a friend and Lodge brother seven years ago. Wallace hasn't been back to the Cove in about a year, but I still hear from him from time to time.
The topic of the poll, if not the poll itself, bears continual consideration. Sadly, many organizations have eliminated any concept of "meeting or exceeding customer requirements" to a higher focus on profitability and less on customer pleasure or satisfaction.
I believe it is possible to adhere to the concept of meeting or exceeding customer requirements and still make a profit. The question facing many organizations today is whether GREED (of the managers in charge or of the investors) will diminish the effort to "meet or exceed" customer requirements in an effort to maximize that profit.
Many of us today are aware of many products and services which fall short of the mark [of "quality."] The question is whether it is because of ignorance or of purpose of the folks running the operation.
Cynics among us will say, "People have a choice whether to pay more for good quality. If they get bad quality, they are just bad shoppers."
I, however, tend to think about things like "big box stores" which enter a market with very low prices and "average" goods, underselling competition for similar goods that soon retailer competitors are forced to do one of two things:
- lower quality and prices of their own goods
- give up and go out of business
In my local area, Walmart, itself, is faced by so many grocery competitors which offer superior variety or quality goods at fair prices that Walmart is frequently in the top quarter of prices on many products. In a recent week, using sales circulars distributed with newspapers, Walmart's price on a gallon of whole milk was higher than five stores within a two mile radius of the Walmart. In one case, another big retailer, Walgreens, was $1.00 less than Walmart's price.
The stores which are able to match or beat Walmart on the traditional loss leaders which bring customers in the door are probably doing so because high profit, high end goods like prime grade meats are not sold at Walmart and customers who come in for loss leaders like milk have the desire and the cash to purchase those high end products and keep the retailers profitable enough to match or beat Walmart's loss leaders.
In other communities, though, Walmart is the 800 pound gorilla, able to undersell competitors for a year or more until driving them out of business and then Walmart's prices at such stores shoot up almost immediately. It is a certainty that Walmart is not selling quality of goods or services, but merely competing on price. Apparently, folks in my community are not yet so strapped for cash that Walmart's general low prices offset the quality of goods and services available at competitors. Such is not the case in communities in some locations where Walmart has become the sole retailer for everything from gasoline to disposable diapers.
That's only talking about quality at a local, micro level. When we consider the effect of discarding "meet or exceed customer requirements" we really have to turn to the macro level where price has driven many manufacturers to low wage locations, often sacrificing what quality was available in their original location in order to meet the price point pressure demanded by big box retailers, with a consequent cascade effect on quality throughout the supply chain.
Is there a solution?
My intuition is that the situation will get worse before it gets better. Like most change to be effective, the population under consideration must first become united in their dissatisfaction with the status quo, then band together to drive toward eliminating that dissatisfaction. That change and band of dissatisfied people will need a LEADER, not merely a manager.
Which one of us from the quality profession is ready, willing, and able to step forward and be that leader?