J. D. Rockefeller experimented with fewer and fewer drops of solder to seal five-gallon kerosene cans. I appreciate this lesson as well as the next man. If you can invest less material or time and still produce a quality product, by all means, do so. But today’s business metrologists have forgotten half of this very American tradition. We’ve forgotten the part about making a quality product.
When my plastic wrap can’t support its own weight long enough to cover a bowl, we’ve taken things too far. When I can’t pour from a two-liter bottle without fearing it will collapse, when the tuna in my can bears more similarity to a poker chip than a hockey puck (when they say packed with water, they really mean packed), when the infra-red non-motion detector for the public toilet I’m using turns it into a bidet, it’s time we reexamined our priorities.
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