The myth of cheap goods from China and the Far East, and more recently from Eastern Europe, is finally collapsing. Having had years of importing deflation, whilst blindly exporting hard currency, suddenly we wake up to the fact that they have all our money, and all the drivel we bought needs replacing.
The market is finally waking up to the realisation that actually a purchase like a kitchen must be value for money in the long term, not a short term fix. At a time when you might imagine now more than ever customers would be trying to save money with cheaper purchases, in fact the opposite is true. It’s not that the demand for value isn’t there – certainly that’s never been more resolute – but there is the realisation that buying real quality just once is the way forward.
The problem is the internet has twisted in on itself. As shopping on-line dominates, internet savvy retailers realise that they don’t need to know anything about the products, nor do they really care. It’s no longer about the product, it’s the way they sell it that matters. And at that point things will go wrong, and of course they have. It’s all very well comparing two identical products, like two particular Sony televisions. That’s easy, and we all do it, and who wouldn’t?! But what happens when it comes to,say, Oak worktops? Or a bespoke kitchen? An internet retailer can make his worktops sound just like ours, and they do this mostly by copying our text and ideas. How then do customers actually tell the difference? That’s the hard bit. Photographs are a start, and so are samples. But in the end the judgement call comes down to trust. Most sane people know when something is too cheap to be well made, but it didn’t stop almost a generation changing their purchasing habits. The roaring internet 2000’s and the cheap money we all now realise was more expensive than we could possibly have imagined, are behind us. Those purchasing criteria of our parents’ generation suddenly seem rather cleverer than we realised. Buy it well, and buy it to last.
It’s time to throw away the throwaway society. It’s time to realise that the consequences of cheap labor from abroad lifts them and drops us. Buy British and be proud of it, and buy something the people who made it, sold it and delivered it are proud of it too. Because quality lasts. Just like our fabulous oak tree at Anmer Hall.
