the slippery slope.................

Mechanized scale brings productivity and certainty, but it also brings huge short-run rewards for cutting corners. Save a penny a loaf with a handmade product and it’s no big deal. Save a penny a loaf when you make 10,000 a day and it begins to add up to real money. So it pays to add a bit of stabilizer, change to a more reliable oven temperature and switch to a cheaper flour…

This is what people who care about quality are actually fretting about. It’s not the scale. It’s the shortcuts that sometimes come with it.

Quality, by definition, is meeting spec. If you don’t like the spec, make the spec better.

We can have scale and consistency and quality. But we can’t have all three at the same time when we race (or are pushed) to the bottom.

Bit by bit, we either make things better or we make them worse.

-Seth Godin, from this post