In order for companies to increase their bottom line and beat the competition to market, many of our products are now coming from businesses overseas these days. Sometimes in the manufacturing process, things get overlooked and mistakes are made because most companies don’t necessarily adhere to the same manufacturing standards we use here in the United States. And when you take into consideration that the labor force these companies use is in many cases underskilled, under-paid and have to work in an environment that pushes them to work longer hours, it’s no wonder we have so many product recalls each year. Negative Impact On Consumers Take for example Samsung, who this last month faced some pretty serious issues with their Samsung Galaxy Note 7 smart phone where some customers here in the United States reported their phones caught on fire. To resolve this, Samsung promptly recalled the smart phone. For those of you who have been following this story in the news, you may already know that after Samsung replaced the phone but shortly after they were received, customers soon discovered the problem had not been resolved but reoccurred and as a result, many returned their phones and switched to the iPhone 7 instead. And even though this was a windfall for Apple, the impact was devastating to Samsung in lost revenue, and to the millions of Samsung customers who bought their phones simply because they believed in the Samsung name, which for them, stood for quality. And even though Samsung finally shelved the Note 7 phone altogether, the back- lash that all this has caused will definitely have a long lasting effect on Samsung, especially when it comes to earning back the trust and loyalty of their customers who believed in the Samsung brand. The point of all of this is whenever manufacturing processes like quality checks and safety take a back seat all for the sake of the bottom line, and faulty products are shipped, it is usually us consumers who feel the impact the most especially if we’ve spent a lot of money for a product from a company we truly believed in and trusted. It’s Business as Usual As the consumer market continues to grow and the demand for better products from these companies increases, I’m afraid to say that if their business practices don’t change for the better, the problems we’re now seeing with the increasing recalls each year will only get worse as time goes on. For many of these companies, this seems to be business as usual at least for now. And unfortunately for us,who rely on these products, we simply have no other choice so we’ll just have accept the fact that this is what we can expect to deal with in the future.