THE NEED FOR QUALITY

Complaint: Products Should Be Better

APPEARANCE is no longer the prime factor in selling," says American Motors President George Romney. "We are now in an era of functionalism." What he means in plain English is that the U.S. businessman today finds himself in a tough, competitive buyer's market where the U.S. consumer has become a poking, prying comparison shopper, his checklist topped by one word written out in budget black: quality. Buyers loudly complain that familiar products are just not so good as they used to be--and the figures tend to bear them out. Pittsburgh's Better Business Bureau reported a 19% increase last year in complaints on defective merchandise.

Businessmen are well aware of the problem of quality. Many manufacturers are convinced that "planned obsolescence" has gone too far; that the annual addition of frills and fripperies takes money that could be better used to improve quality. "Certainly in cars," says International Harvester Vice President Mark Keeler. "the cost of restyling is a waste. From a performance standpoint, it contributes nothing." To combat rising labor and material costs, some manufacturers have tried to save by taking a chance on materials that often turn out to be inferior. On the other hand, the very productivity and ingenuity of U.S. industry has created quality problems: ten years ago, when a housewife had only two or three major appliances, the breakdown of one was not so noticeable. Today she may have three or four times as many, and if three break down within a week, she may well feel nothing works--and holler.

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Dealers are belatedly joining her in hollering, since they lose the housewife's confidence--and future sales--and are forced to provide excessive service repairs. For example, New York's Korvette chain last year found that a nationally advertised TV set had a bad part. Korvette refused to sell it until the flaw was corrected.

With sales dwindling, the entire appliance industry is in the midst of an ambitious program to improve quality. "I'm not saying the whole thing is lousy," explains one Norge executive, "but the automatic washer is probably more susceptible to service than any other appliance in the home." He speaks from rueful personal experience. For years there was no formal exchange between Norge's service department and its engineers, and chronic complaints never filtered back to the machine designers--a gap since remedied. Maytag decided to drop annual model changes, use the savings for better quality control, and sales soared To test its 1961 refrigerators, Westinghouse shipped them to nine representative dealers for home testing. The dealers found that the refrigerator doors began to bend and leak air, a design flaw that factory inspection had failed to turn up. Los Angeles Waste King Corp. employs Mrs. Sylvia White, a sociologist, to represent the consumer on the spot. She has shut down a production line because she concluded that a new change was not an improvement, explaining with housewifely common sense: "Engineers can design anything. But you may have to stand on your head to make it work."

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Detroit has launched a broad campaign to improve quality this year. Until recently Detroit relied chiefly on a final inspection of finished cars to catch flaws. "But because of pressures from the top down." admits Chrysler Quality Control Director C. G. Bauer, "there were few rejects--they were too costly." Inspectors were allowed a margin of individual judgment about whether a part was car-worthy. Now they have no alternative; a part must correspond exactly to the engineer's specifications or out it goes. Chrysler now holds back a car with 35 demerits in its final inspection, whereas a car with 75 demerits used to be considered good--and the demerit standards are also tougher now. General Motors is applying" on its auto assembly lines a system of reliability controls that was first developed for close-tolerance defense work. Ford made 66 internal changes toward better quality in its 1961 models, ranging from an improved ignition system to a 30,000-mile no-lubrication chassis. Result: the auto industry is so sure of the quality of its 1961 lines that for the first time in history, it stretched written warranties on most parts to one year, or 12,000 miles.

U.S. industry is slowly rediscovering what its best businessmen have known all along: that quality will sell goods better than price alone. Zenith (radios and electronics) advertises today as it did in 1926 that "Zenith costs more but does more." The company has earned a quality reputation, sports a profit picture that is the envy of much of the industry. Despite the drop in house building. Builder William J. Levitt sold more than $5,000,000 worth of houses outside Washington. D.C. in one recent week. Bill Levitt explains his feat simply: "The public is starved for values." The fact is that the well-heeled U.S. consumer is still willing to buy and buy high, but more and more he wants to be sure he is getting what he pays for.

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