The real price of cheap electronic goods.

Before we start.
I should point out that this is not intended as a rant or a call to arms, I have no plans to call for a ban on cheap products. I do understand that some people are living on a tight budget, and we cannot all afford the better, rather more expensive option.
Rather than telling you to stop buying cheap electronics, I am actually going to suggest that you could go even cheaper.

What this is about.
The electronics industry, like most industries, is now driven by price. Price and profit come first, regardless of the amount of needless waste and what it does to the environment.
In order to reduce prices, manufacturers obviously have to reduce costs. In many cases, this can mean cutting corners and scrapping perfectly good equipment simply because their production revolves around producing more. It is cheaper for them to produce excess amounts of the product, scrapping some, than to spend time looking for their mistakes.

Market forces.
Here in the UK, the consumer appears to be swayed by a couple of main issues:
  Gadgets.
  Price.
More knobs and buttons on electronic equipment makes it look more impressive, even if you will never touch those controls. Software companies boast about all the things their product can do, knowing that most of those functions will never be used. But they sound impressive.
As for price, nobody is cheaper than a Brit hitting the High Street. If you cannot see the difference (more knobs), then lowest price wins. Really, we are a victim of our own greed. We want to be paid high wages, yet pay low prices in the shops. Manufacturers are simply giving us exactly what we go for, and the higher quality products simply get pushed out the market place.

Driving forces.
Here in the UK, although efforts are made to keep costs down, the main driving force has always been quality. A product should do what it is designed to do, and keep doing it for a reasonable period of time.
The alternative idea is that it should simply be cheap, a short life will ensure that you sell more. The question is just how much you can cut and get away with it.

Effects of prices.

Quality control.
Here in the UK, manufacturers usually care that products work correctly. Returned products cost in time and parts. Not being part of a production line, any repairs are slower than production.
If a fault turns out to be a design error, then the issue must be kicked up to R&D who cost more per hour than production or repair staff. If it turns out to be poor quality components, then better ones will need to be used - increasing the cost and forcing up prices.

Pure quantity.
What if you can stop the faulty products from ever returning? You never need worry how poor the quality, how many are faulty or missing parts that should have been put in the box at the factory.
You would never need to worry about repair staff, no worries about modifying designs to work correctly. You don't even need to know how poor the product is if it can never come back to you. Even better, every one that gets scrapped means another sale. Higher rates of failure actually increase profit.
This may sound like a dream world, but part of the trade-off with cheap imported goods is that the retailer may take on the guarantee.

Cutting corners.
Normal production will involve designing, building prototypes, testing prototypes, production, testing each unit and quality inspecting each item. The prototype testing, and in some cases, production testing may include soak-testing to ensure good life span. Any failures will be investigated and necessary corrections made to design or production.
If you stop worrying about returns, you could cut out soak testing, and possibly reduce production testing to testing a small percentage. After all, the consumer will do the testing. You no longer need technical staff to investigate failures, as you never see them.

Reputation.
You may think that failures lead to a bad reputation, but this may not always be the case.
If you get a faulty product, you get it replaced and that works. You were just unlucky, there will always be some that fail and you got the one in a thousand, right? Consider the number of makes and models, what are the chances that you will know someone with the same product, let alone one that failed to work.
As long as the number of failures is low enough, so that few people will ever get two failures in a row, then a consumer will believe that they were just unlucky.

No choice.
Going back to the number of makes and models, it would appear that manufacturers have to produce good products or else lose sales. Don't be fooled, much of what you see is the same product with a different name on it.
You have little choice, it's all the same stuff from the same source. Even if you do stop buying a certain make, you will probably still be buying it with another label on it.
Of course you could buy home produced equipment, as long as you are willing to pay the extra cost.

The true cost.
This pricing strategy is really about perceived cost and value. A manufacturer really needs to convince the retailer to buy the product. You, the consumer, can only buy their products if the retailers have been convinced to stock it.
However, when considering the retail price, the shop must include the cost of all the units they will scrap because the manufacturer was in too much of a rush to test or even check that they remembered to put a remote control in with it. Yes, folks, a retailer may scrap a new product simply because the remote control was not included in the box.
And all of this waste has to be considered when working out the retail prices.