If you were to add up all the defects in all the automotive recalls in history, you would not reach the order of magnitude of an outfit that has a billion products sitting in two warehouses awaiting sorting and disposition. At a hundred bucks a pop, this mammoth quality fiasco dwarfs all of the legendary ineptitude of Johnson & Johnson over the past few years. And two months after the fact, these guys are still reviewing the situation to determine who to blame and how to sort out the mountain of trash they manufactured.
Who could be so incompetent as to manufacture in lot sizes of a billion without controlling quality at the source? Who could miss a defect visible to the naked eye for so long that entire warehouses were filled before it was caught? Only one outfit can be so wretchedly incompetent when it comes to manufacturing. Only one group of people can be so out of touch with fundamental quality control principles - basic manufacturng common sense, for that matter - to create such a quality cluster.
And that outfit, of course, is the United States government. The US Department of Treasury, to be specific. The branch of the government teeming with Ivy League MBA's and Ph D's who are charged with leading our collective interest in bringing General Motors into the age of enlightenment.
Seems as though the boys and girls over at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing - people who literally do have a license to print money - cranked out over a billion brand spanking new hundred dollar bills before they figured out that the paper was crinkled, causing the printing to miss the parts of the paper under the crinkle.
They didn't figure out that the cash they were printing in October was no good until they had filled a couple of warehouses. They blather on about the technology and complexity that goes into making counterfeit resistant money, but have yet to explain what printing a "color shifting image of a bell" has to do with wrinkled paper.
"It’s great that the bureau was able to detect those notes before they made it into circulation," said the government. Would been greater had they detected them before they made a billion of them, I say.
"We don’t have perfect clarity in terms of fault," said the government. Get out of the stone age and worry more about what is obviously a train wreck of a quality system and quit worrying about "fault", I say.
The folks in charge over at Treasury hand picked the new boss over at GM. A money man - like them - with not a whit of manufacturing knowledge or sense - like them. That does not bode well for the folks in Detroit. But give credit where it is due. They only lost ten bucks a share on our interest in GM. That's pretty good for guys who fill warehouses with hundred dollar scraps of shredder fodder.