Quality vs. Affordability

A perennial issue facing businesses and consumers alike is how to strike a balance between quality and affordability. What shopper doesn’t enjoy splurging on a luxury item from time to time? However, as anyone with less than unlimited financial resources can attest, buying the best of whatever you buy is a great way to wind up broke in no time flat. Businesses recognize this and often may lower the quality standards of a product in order to offer it at a more affordable price, thus gaining an edge over their competition. However, this can result in the opposite extreme of the quality/price spectrum, in which a product may be affordable, but the quality is so low that the merits of the purchase become questionable at best.

I recently read a profile on Fred Franzia, a vintner who has made a fortune bending the rules that have traditionally governed quality and affordability in the wine industry. If his name isn’t familiar to you (his family originally owned the Franzia brand behind the boxed wine), you’ve also probably heard of Franzia’s greatest success, Charles Shaw. Charles Shaw, or as it is often affectionately called “Two Buck Chuck”, is a wine made predominantly from a blend of grapes that would have otherwise been thrown away that is sold in many markets for $1.99 a bottle. In an industry where even the highest quality vineyards declare bankruptcy on a regular basis, Charles Shaw has enjoyed record sales and brought wine consumption to new demographics.

At best, Franzia is a populist. He believes the enjoyment of wine should not be an elitist pursuit and is determined to make wine consumption as ubiquitous in America as beer. Franzia has made a fortune off of lowering the quality of his product to facilitate offering it at the lowest feasible price. This in and of itself is not an ignoble pursuit. He has landed in hot water however by misrepresenting the contents of his wines, labeling bottles with inaccurate information on the quality, type and origin of grapes. Franzia also has been known to capitalize on the misfortune of his fellow winemakers, buying the rights to prestigious brands that have fallen on hard financial times and using the cache of their names to sell far lower quality wine than the brand originally represented.

These kind of practices strike me as deceitful and, in my opinion, reveal Franzia to be far more concerned with making money that crafting a quality product or even honestly offering a lower quality product to gain a competitive edge on a certain cross section of wine buyers. I do agree with his assertion that snobbery and elitism are all too present in many circles of winemaking and consumption. But willfully selling a poor quality product under the auspices of it being something else is deceitful and Franzia seems to be far more concerned with making a buck than expanding the cultural reach of his product.

Though I’d be unlikely to buy a bottle of wine because of an extremely low price, I don’t see much merit in spending fifty; eighty or one hundred dollars on a bottle of wine either. While I don’t profess to be a connoisseur, I have a hard time grasping what a $100 bottle of wine has to offer than I can’t get for $15 or $20.  Whether I’m buying wine, clothes or office furniture, I try to maintain a similar mantra; buy a well-crafted yet unpretentious product at a reasonable price. If an item’s price or purported quality seems too good to be true, it probably is.

~ by rauffenberg on August 9, 2010.