Whatever Happened To Quality?

I'm ticked off about my jeans.

Usually there are much grander things to be ticked off about like the fact our Federal Government keeps digging this country a deficit hole that currently is about two thirds of the way through the planet and headed directly to Beijing. It's looking grim and just to hedge my bets I've been boning up on useful Chinese phrases.

多少木材将一盘，如果土拨鼠土拨鼠可以夹头木材？
(How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?)

While the runaway federal deficit is a worthy thing to be ticked off about, today I'm focusing my scorn on my pants.

Normally, pants do not irritate me.

Usually, my pants do a bang-up job of keeping my legs warm and my paleness out-of-sight. My pants protect me from wayward rocks stirred up by my weadwacker in the summer time and when I'm crawling around refinishing a hardwood floor as I did this past fall.

Of course, I usually reserve old pants for that kind of work. Those are the pants that I've worn enough times that the cuffs are getting frayed and the openings to the pockets are showing wear.

For me, old pants do not die, they just become attire for various maintenance work. Even after the pants are too tattered to be used for maintenance work -- this usually involves a Catastrophic Crotch Blow Out that sometimes happens to me when I don't use a belt and am doing a lot of bending and stretching -- I use them for rags.

But obviously, I like a little time to go by between when I originally buy my pants and when I'm cutting them up into rags, preferably a couple years.

The pants I was ticked off about were showing premature wear in the calf region. They're only about 4 months old and at this rate they're not going to last a year. The denim is looking like I've been clumsily climbing barbed wire fences. I know that some people like their pants to have that distressed, fresh-from-climbing-barb-wire-fences look, but that wasn't what I'd bought. I bought new pants that I expected to basically look new for at least a year.

Of course, I believe that our civilization reached the height of pants technology with the Toughskins jeans that Sears sold when I was a kid. Toughskins was an appropriate name. While they were made out of denim, they wore like leather.

They were also the bluest pants you've ever seen. Boys who wore them looked like half child and half-Smurf. And they never, ever faded. Not sure what kind of dye they used in those jeans -- lead-based probably -- but you would out-grow them before they showed any sign of wear or fading.

But today's jeans just don't compare. I realize that's business. If a company can shave a few pennies off of every unit of a given product they make by using less raw materials, the overall saving can be tremendous.

And in this case, how many customers are really going to notice that the denim used to make their jeans wasn't quite as good as it used to be?

质量低劣的痛苦仍然不久，低廉的价格甜度是遗忘。 -莱昂米考蒂洛
(The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of cheap price is forgotten. -- Leon M. Cautillo)