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[goelmohit2002]

"People often complain that products are not made to last. They feel that making products that wear out fairly quickly wastes both natural and human resources. What they fail to see, however is that such manufacturing practices keep costs down for the consumer and stimulate demand."

Which do you find more compelling: the complaint about products that not last or the response to it? Explain your positions using relevant reasons and/or examples from your own experience, observation or reading.


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There is no perfect answer to the question whether a short lived cheap product is better or a product that is made to last is better one. Many people are of the opinion that products that are short lived waste a great amount of natural and human resources which can be avoided by building products with longer lives. But there are people belonging to another school of thought that is of the opinion that manufacturing short lived products is the way to stimulate demand and keep costs low. I agree to the former view point because in addition to wasting human resources and natural resources, short lived products don’t even cost less if we consider the indirect costs associated with them.

First, building short lived products that demand frequent replacements over time tend to waste a great amount of natural resources gifted to us by God. For example, towards the end of millennium compact disk(CD) technology was introduced and was hugely marketed. A huge market of CD players which can play CDs emerged, leading to manufacturing of millions of CD players across the world. But within a span of 4-5 years a new technology DVD that can store multiple times data as compared to CD emerged. This is forcing customers to replace CD players with DVD players as CDs are gradually and fastly replaced by DVDs. The result is that a huge amount of natural resources that are wasted in manufacturing previous CD players because they are ultimately replaced by a newer product within such a short span of 4-5 years.

Second, short life cycle products tend to waste a good amount of human resources too. Workers who work on making good made to last products tend to give their best in making their product best, as they constantly listen to the success stories of the products. In contrast the workers working on sub standard and short lived products tend to give less then their best resulting in lower employee productivity. For example, workers working on projects such as Google search engine are much more motivated due to success stories of Google then the workers who are working on creating short lived products such as computer wall papers. In short, large amount of human resources that are wasted in making short life cycle products can be better utilized in making products which are built to last.

On the other hand, some may argue that these manufacturing practices keep costs down and stimulate demand. This argument is valid if we look in short term horizon. If we broaden our horizon to long term and see the big picture, then frequent replacement, getting adapted to newer product every time a new product comes into market, indirect tax payers money involved in recycling or dumping discarded products actually tend to cost much more than the initial cost that is paid for buying better built to last product. For example wouldn’t it have been better (as we discussed in third paragraph above) if customers had purchased DVD players rather than CD players and saved a lot of their precious time, money, energy and natural resources that were spent in conceptualizing, producing, marketing, using, and then finally replacing the CD-players with DVD players.

In conclusion, although apparently short life products tend to keep costs down but in big picture, they actually cost a great deal more than the products that are built to last. It is better to spend both natural and human resources such as time, energy, money etc. in making better long lasting products rather than short lived products.

[StaceyKoprince]

Hi, thanks for posting your essay! Just an FYI that instructors don't grade or give feedback on essays (see the forum guidelines for details).

But I certainly hope other community members respond. Also, if you're in our class, you'll have an opportunity to get essays graded and get written feedback during the course (after class 6). The official GMAT test makers also offer an essay grading service, GMAT Write (for a fee) - you can take a look at their web site (www.mba.com) for details.