On Standardization

Eli Whitney started a big revolution in the industrial world, when his concept of interchangeable parts brought about the concept of standardization – how the life would be easier for everybody if the parts were made to standard specification and could be used interchangeably, so that one does not have to make specific mating parts. If that was a game changer, then the Engineers at Allout Mosquito Repellant have gone a step further. They have achieved what I would like to call a one way standardization. Here is a description. I had a Good Knight vaporizer machine, and I was shopping my stock of refills. The shop did not have Good Knight, so I accepted All-Out refills – a lot of them (my monthly stock). Only to discover, once home, that the darned things won’t fit in the vaporizer machine. That was strange – since till then I had only seen interchangeable refills vis-à-vis machines from any brand. Why would Allout do this suicidal thing? Then I saw that the empty Good Knight refill fit snugly in the Allout Cap ( a proxy for the Allout vaporizer cavity). Then it hit me – the geniuses at Allout had made some design change, so that while Good Knight machine will not fit their refills, the Allout machine would fit both its own as well as Good Knight. Effectively, it was an effort to make hapless people, who had bought Allout refills, in good faith, for their Good Knight machines, buy Allout machines. It was a gamble – either the customer can chuck the refill in the dustbin / return it and get a fresh Good Knight one, or he may go –‘Oh, what the hell’, and get an Allout Machine – which fits both refills. Or, he may be like me – I compared both the refills and noticed that the Allout guys had changed the stopper design a little bit. So I took my cork screw and changed the stopper on the refills – and I was still using the Allout refill with a Good Knight machine. This was mankind’s triumph over evil corporate designs to cheat hapless consumers

On Shopping

Shopping, for me, is a very harrowing experience. May be it is because I am looking for very specific functionalities in the goods I am going to spend my buck on. Like a good public procurement officer, I am very thorough in framing my specifications. Most people would buy a Levi’s or a Wrangler. I’d buy a pair of jeans – medium shade of blue – between navy and royal, that has lycra blended, is not tight fitting, and has straight pockets. Even the shopkeepers are exasperated when they hear my demands – they are so specific and ‘business like’ that their ‘consumer market’ stocks cannot keep a match.

Similar is my trouble in shopping in big cities. I currently live in Mumbai – the biggest city in the country, with all sorts of things being sold – if it is sold in India, it is sold in Mumbai. Yet, I do my shopping in the south Gujarat town of Vapi – whenever I am in the town for official work, and have some after hours to kill before the return train. Strange! No. As I have admitted, shopping is a chore for me. So I cannot shop in Mumbai. Here, it is like – you want elecronics – go to Dadar. You want clothes – go to Linking Road. You want provisions, go to Fort. I’d rather prefer I get all my things in within one walk. So, I prefer the markets of small towns, where one shoe shop stores all varieties, and it is next to a garments shop, which keeps all variety, which is next to the Pharmacy, which won’t ask you for a prescription to give you the drugs you need for your emergency stock. I would rather not repeat my experience of trying to buy a new pair of shoes in Bandra – no shoe store in Pali Hill area – go to Linking Road. On the Linking Road, all you get are weird sounding ( and obviously pricey like hell) exclusive stores – and no familiar comforting names like Bata, Action or Liberty. In fact, they check you out up and down if you ask for those stores! In the end, you spot a small Woodland store, the only familiar name in this jungle of brands, all waiting to classify you into matrices and S- curves and skim off your money! It is then one realizes – “once a small town shopper, always a small town shopper.”