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Modern business models don't take pride into account. Pride in your work isn't "efficient". Today, if you take pride in what you're doing, you'll likely be shown the front door and be outsourced. If you take pride in your work in some other countries, you're just shot dead and replaced.
I travel for a living, all over the country. I do it in a 1991 Chevy Corvette on which I've racked up 230,000 miles and counting. Its predecessor, a 1984 Corvette, I put 207,000 miles on and then traded it up, still running strong. I'm sure it's still out there. The people who design the Corvette still take pride in their work. The Bowling Green, Kentucky plant is the last American car company. No doubt someday they'll be made in China too, but until then they're built like a rock and run forever (and look great doing it), because fiberglass doesn't rust and titanium doesn't rust or bend, and aluminum doesn't rust and doesn't weigh anything. They run forever because they've got a slow-thumping big-block V8 running cool, instead of trying to squeeze blood out of a 3-cylinder at 9000 RPM with a turbo and half-a-million lines of code in an overheated computer. Plan B is cheaper and more efficient (and disposable). Plan A is pride in your work.
Unfortunately, most people would rather buy a Hyundai (or a Chery or a Geely) and throw it away after two years or whenever it breaks, whichever comes first. Like we didn't learn anything from the Yugo.
I'm sure they made some crap in the 50's and 60's too, but it's long gone. What's left to today's collectors are the "corvettes" of the day. Zenith roundie '60s color sets. 50's RCA consoles, or better yet the DuMonts, Capeharts, Stromberg-Carlsons of the late 40's or early 50's. Pride, overbuilt like tanks, last forever. And look good doing it. The same is true of radios and cars and audio gear and electric guitars too. If I can make one observation, I'd just say that the pride-to-crap ratio has steadily declined over the last half century, just so subliminally that nobody notices until suddenly a newspaper reporter is asking why a TV set should last more than a year.
This summer my Corvette broke a serpentine-belt tensioner. The original one lasted sixteen years. I bought a foreign-made replacement part that had a 90-day warranty. It lasted 91 days. Because some Operations Researcher optimized all the costs and materials and outsourced the labor and got the part made two-cents cheaper than humanly possible and thereby just made it last out the warranty, which is all the staff of lawyers said it had to do. Nice work. Nice profit margin. Great quarterly-earnings report to the shareholders. Pat him on the back. The first belt tensioner was made with pride in Kentucky. The difference between the two tensioners I think really tells you all you need to know to write a good article. TVs or toasters or whatever. IMHO.
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