High-Tech, Low-Tech : Consumers’ Woe: Buy It Then Build It
Parents who purchased a Cabbage Patch fold-up doll stroller can’t say they weren’t warned of the chore ahead. The box was thin and flat, the pictured stroller clearly three-dimensional. And down in a lower corner, in tiny print, were the terrible words, “Adult Assembly Required.”
“Still, I didn’t expect just a pile of parts,” said a Los Angeles mother who found herself one night in a classic comedy routine, sorting out front and rear wheel shafts, connecting rods, right and left slide bushings, plastic spacers, rattle rods, screws, washers and something called palnuts--all for the second time.
The first time she had tackled the chore, she missed a bump on the stroller handle indicating which side should be turned inward, put it on wrong, hammered on a palnut, and--palnuts being by definition unremovable--was unable to get it off.
The VCR Sitcom
“I hammered at it for an hour, trying to get it apart, while my daughter sat there crying,” she said. “Finally I went out and bought another of the things and started again.”
At the opposite extreme, but really part of the same sitcom, is the videocassette recorder, today’s hottest electronic toy. It doesn’t need assembly, but it has to be installed properly and carefully programmed to record up to eight events on different television channels over three weeks. As a result, said photographer Allan Grant, “nine out of 10 people I know with a VCR don’t know what to do with it when they get it home: They can rent and play back tapes, but they can’t record off the air.”
These two frustrations--one high-tech, one low-tech--are particularly contemporary. In the one case, a sophisticated instrument is being heavily mass-marketed to a mass unable to figure it out. In the other, the product turns out to be a product kit. Consumer labor is an appreciable component of both “ready-made” goods.
Buyers ‘Don’t Read’
In both cases, instructions become very important--and a bone of contention. Manufacturers say they are perfectly clear: If there’s a problem, it’s that consumers don’t read. “The major problem,” said one toy store manager, “is single parents, especially female.”
Baloney, said a Van Nuys lawyer (male). “The accompanying manuals are written for engineers or designers, not kids or housewives or me.” If such goods are meant for the masses, added a new father who has spent whole weekends on such construction, “the instructions should be idiot-proof.”
The high-tech problem is not hard to understand. Today’s electronic wonders--computers, VCRs, compact disc players, even televisions--are too technically complicated for many consumers. “Nobody I know can even reset his digital watch when we go on or off daylight saving,” said television writer Arnold Peyser. “They all go to a jeweler.”
Many require a high degree of owner participation--a problem for people who are “over 25, aren’t so button-friendly and have to keep putting on their bifocals,” said Boston artist Judith Marriner. Indeed, Sony finds that most of the 1,200 calls received daily by its toll-free customer service number involve “operational” questions; four or five years ago, they were more about service.
Each year, it only gets worse, as “the companies do battle on all the extras,” said toy designer A. Eddy Goldfarb. “It could be 14 days or 10 months programming ahead, but then nobody ever uses it.”
“The flexibility is there,” said Sony corporate spokesman Jason Farrow in Park Ridge, N.J., “but it comes at the price of apparent complication. They haven’t solved the problem of making it simple enough to do by intuition.” What’s more, Americans may “buy something with a lot of bells and whistles just because it’s there,” said Joe McFadden, national technical services manager for Sears, Roebuck in Chicago.
Should they want to try the bells or whistles, they are dependent on the accompanying instructions, many of which seem just “afterthoughts to product development and packaging,” said Wally Hall, whose Sun City, Calif. Instruction Enterprises produces such manuals. “Hundreds of thousands are spent on the exterior packaging and nothing on the manual: It’s like once the product leaves the store, the manufacturers don’t care what happens to it.”
Literal Translations
It may be a translation problem--literally. Many manuals are prepared in the factory by English-speaking Japanese, then rewritten here or just looked over. The result is some odd wordings: “Press the safety button with pressing the REC button when you want to recording,” says an NEC manual. Even Sony’s widely sold videocassette tapes until recently bore the instruction “This Side Faces Forward,” meaning one should slide that side in first.
Many electronic product manuals, moreover, seem to be written by engineers for engineers, or at least by technocrats for technocrats. A telephone’s manual, Hall said, “may say ‘Perform a manual transmission response’ when they mean ‘Answer the phone.’ ” There may also be omissions--”something we haven’t gone into enough clarity with,” McFadden said. “We’re familiar with the terms, and sometimes we skip over a sequence because it’s so basic.”
Sometimes help is available. Retail salesmen may offer installation and instruction, for a fee. There may also be a toll-free number, like Sony’s, which costs the company “seven figures,” Farrow said, and still has the capacity to answer only one in three calls. The machine itself may even help: Some VCRs offer “on-screen” instructions for users as they move through the programming.
It is quite a different problem with low-tech frustrations, most of which involve children’s toys and household furniture. Here, the consumer has to build, not just operate, his new possession, and for a reason that has nothing to do with technological advance: money. “They’re not really out to irritate the consumer,” Goldfarb said. “They’re just trying to be cost-efficient.”
“Knockdown,” or unassembled, products have always been around, often in catalogues and often cheaper than in stores, but in the last 10 years “consumer labor” has been a part of more and more goods, particularly cabinets and furniture, Sears’ McFadden said.
“It’s a cost-saving that goes to the consumer: We can put it out cheaper,” said Barbara Wruck, spokesman for Coleco Industries (maker of the Cabbage Patch stroller) in West Hartford, Conn.
‘The Cheapest Thing’
For a manufacturer, “the cheapest thing is to mill boards and put a few holes in, and let the consumer adjust what doesn’t fit,” said Bennett McClellan, a McKinsey & Co. management consultant in Los Angeles. “If they put it together and something doesn’t fit, they have to throw it out, which gives them a high waste factor.”
The consumer labor required nowadays can be a nasty surprise. One Long Beach couple was shocked when a top-of-the-line brass-and-iron canopied baby crib and changing table--which cost them more than $700--were delivered in boxes, unassembled. And a Riverside father and two neighbors were almost overcome by the struggle with a Sears tricycle, which came in 86 pieces, some with only minute differences to tell them apart, such as 2 Sheet Metal Screws (5/8-inch x No. 8) versus 3 Sheet Metal Screws (5/8-inch x No. 12).
Some of these things--certainly cribs and tricycles--used to be put together by the retailer before sale, but there has been a revolution in retailing. Small specialty stores have yielded to big self-service, low-margin super stores that can offer lower prices because they enjoy volume sales and lower costs: They measure sales in volume per square foot and turnover time.
“In that kind of retailing, every inch counts,” said Spencer Boise, vice president of corporate affairs for Mattel.
“In the last decade, everything has become computerized,” said Robert Goldberg, a New York-based consultant in marketing and packaging, “and every day the store knows what is occupying its square footage. A retailer today is really in the real estate business: He’s using space and getting a return on his investment, so he has to have everything knocked down.”
Air on the Shelves
Compact packaging becomes all-important: No one wants to give shelf space to the air in structures like furniture, serving carts and ride-on toys. They also want to keep handling costs down by stocking only packages easily handled by store personnel and consumers and by performing no set-up or assembly.
Space is also at a premium in shipping. “Before this,” said Norman Rosen, president of Rochelle Juvenile Furniture in Duncannon, Pa., “freight was an insignificant factor in the cost of goods--it was material, then labor, and freight was at the bottom. But in the last 10 years, even with the discounts truckers began putting in since deregulation in 1981, it’s gotten quite significant--30% on a highchair shipped from the East to the West Coast and 10% from our factory to New York City.” The consideration even affects product design: When a portable crib’s package exceeded United Parcel Service’s limit of 108 inches for girth and length combined, Rochelle shortened some side extensions.
Sometimes what is most cost-efficient (products knocked down into small parts) is in conflict with what is good for the consumer (very little assembly). “The more assembly we require,” Rosen said, “the more we’re likely to get it back from the consumer.”
The American consumer, that is. Europeans are better craftsmen, or at least more in the habit of contributing their labor. “Europe has had higher freight and lumber costs for some time,” Rosen said. “Manufacturers started passing those costs along earlier there, and Europeans got used to putting things together.”
Delicate Tasks
No one dares leave certain tasks to the American consumer--the gluing, for example, required on wooden highchairs and anything with drawers; “Europeans, you can just give them the glue,” Rosen said. Some bikes, usually the larger ones, come with the chains already on, and there may be some partial assembly on skill and action games, Wruck said--usually “some small-part assembly or some mechanism instrumental to the operation of the item, like a little motor or the insides of a toy typewriter.”
In some cases, the manufacturer provides some sample assembly. One of the four posts of a Simmons crib, for example, comes “trimmed” with the required hardware, said Jerry Lund, sales and marketing manager for Simmons Juvenile Products in New London, Wis., “to give the consumer an idea how to do the others.”
Some products, moreover, were purposely designed to limit the assembly required of a consumer. Mattel’s Tuff Stuff line of toy strollers, shopping carts and wagons--usually the subject of assembly nightmares--come in large pieces requiring no more sophisticated tools than a screwdriver, if that. The stroller body, for example, consists of two sides, a two-piece center section and two handles that snap together, and the wheels are attached with eight screws.
But with low-tech as well as high-tech goods, if there’s any assembly at all, “everything hinges on the instruction manual,” Wally Hall said. “The product is not the bike, or the toy, but the instruction manual and all the parts. They can make you assemble things--that’s not what people mind--but it should be easy and it should be fun.”
‘We Make It Simple’
Many companies say that their manuals are prepared by “technical writers” and that the final version must be approved by designers, engineers and, finally, by consumers, often in some kind of hands-on test. Consumers are “given the item and the instruction guide,” Wruck said, “and later asked to fill out a form about whether they had any problem with the assembly or the language in the guide. We make it as simple as possible.”
Some say that consumers just “misread the instructions,” said a spokesman for Bergstrom’s, a six-store California chain. Some do read them, but then “selectively follow the instructions,” Wruck said, “skipping a step and then trying to work backwards.”
“Most people,” said Martin Casper, president of Hedstrom (bicycles) in Bedford, Pa., “will take all the parts out and see if they’re all there, but they’ll go from step 1 to step 4 because it looks easier to put the pedals on, say, than the chain.”
Consumers, for their part, complain that too much is made of their responsibility--even missing parts, unfortunately a common occurrence and perhaps avoidable. At Hedstrom, “as each box goes down into the final place to be sealed and labeled,” Casper said, “there’s a very sensitive scale (underneath) which can pick up the absence of a single screw.”
Some companies depend on retailers to solve consumer problems, whether missing parts or misread instructions. This assumes an old-style retailer, of course, who still accepts high handling costs. Simmons, for example, is still sold through franchised specialty stores, which are expected to keep a stock of spare parts. Some manufacturers provide a telephone number with the instructions or, better yet, a toll-free number, like Hedstrom’s, which added a second shift during the weeks before Christmas.
‘Please Write’
All too many, however, simply print their address without phone number on the instruction sheet. Sometimes they include a parts order form, ominously. They may also add, “In case of difficulty, please write.”
The industry view seems to be that few consumers have trouble with assembly. “Out of 100 cribs, we probably don’t assemble more than five,” said the spokesman for Bergstrom’s, which like many retailers will still put together some things, for a price--in Bergstrom’s case, $20 for a crib, a half-hour job.
Few people request assembly--”probably,” said a Los Angeles doctor, “because they tell you it’s easy, it only takes a half-hour. And because you only buy each of these things once, you believe them . . . fool that you are.”
