Production vs. Maintenance
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this, especially as we are seeing many manufacturing facilities lower production all over the world. Maybe we are getting too good at mass producing things, and therefore using too many of the Earth’s resources. Wouldn’t trying to maintain the items we have be more efficient in some ways. I know it is much easier, and usually cheaper, to just buy a new cell phone instead of fix the old one. But maybe if we had some good and inexpensive cell phone maintenance experts to maintain phones by upgrading firmware and/or replacing defective parts to get them running again. And if you look at the human resources issue, I believe that a person uses more of their creative problem solving skills by fixing problems with existing products, as opposed to doing the same thing over and over again on an assembly line. I’m beginning to like this idea of more maintenance and less production. What are your thoughts on this? Is there something I have missed?
