Do we (want to) afford quality anymore?

In addition to my friends’ Dan Koblicska article, I just want to add a few more lines.

For the vast majority of us and I am speaking here about persons and companies/brands quality is affordable. It really is. It is not cheap but is affordable. Say, if people are paying quite a lot of bucks for a good coffee/latte/whatever at Starbucks or for a nice sandwich at a deli why are they not willing to pay any more for good services? Perhaps we all now have a wrong perception of time versus money in conjunction with the concept of quality. We want everything fast (the coffee at Starbucks is really fast served) and we perceive a professional service well-done but at a normal pace as a non-qualitative one. These days fast equals good or qualitative which in most cases is wrong. Yes, it is right for the latte, the sandwich, the buying process on Amazon and the effortless click on Instagram. But from my knowledge, no mason can perform a good job doing it fast. He simply cannot take your order to build your house today (yes, we do want everything today) and in 1 week you move in with your family. No writer can write a snappy good and engaging piece of copy for an advertisement and for Christ’s sake, there is no way to design and manufacture a Mercedes-Benz really fast.

Quality means employing expertise and skills learned over time and that by all means, this is not cheap and not fast. And it looks to me that we got so familiar with the “like”, “swipe” and “buy” buttons online that we cannot see anymore beyond them. Really fast services are the really cheap ones. In fact, they are free.