Even in the smallest, most seemingly easy jobs there needs to be some level of quality assurance. If you disagree, scroll through this article a bit and see if it changes your mind. Consumer protections against questionable quality do go back to the Medieval ages when various guilds were responsible for making sure the things their members produced were up to scratch and wouldn’t discredit the entire profession. Now if a company messes up, its competitors are no doubt gleeful at the opportunity.
Modern companies do use more statistical methods and will generally have an idea of how many units per thousand or million will have some issue. Fixing every single one is generally not considered worth it, so an unlucky consumer down the line will just have to “eat” the company's mistake. On the bright side, if you do end up with a misprinted shirt or some other mistake, you at least get to stand out from the crowd.
Of course, some issues come down to human error, be it a typo, or misreading some instructions. In our private lives, these at most cost us some money and our dignity, as friends and family are likely to constantly bring up some mistake we happened to make. But in the “real world,” mistakes will inevitably cost as much as some lawyers can squeeze out of a jury or the legal system, as most places have a set of rules to define damages from negligence.
As much as business owners and manufacturers may dislike it, these laws do protect us, consumers from them. Even a CEO is also a consumer at times, so it’s important not to be short-sighted here. The origins of the law involved Scotland, a ginger beer float, and a snail. A woman named May Donoghue ordered the aforementioned item and was shocked to discover a dead, decomposed snail in the liquid. This led her to sue the manufacturer of the ginger beer in 1932.
In this case, judge, Lord MacMillan ended up creating a new sort of tort, which is just a legal term for a civil wrong, the sort that they can pursue legal action for. In Donoghue v Stevenson (the latter being the manufacturer of the ginger beer and snail combo,) Donoghue did not outright win the case, but it did create a shift in legal thought about the responsibilities of manufacturers, particularly for food and beverages.
The result is that anyone who does not take “reasonable care” to protect a third party can be held liable. This started with food and drinks but quickly expanded. So a doctor giving bad advice can be sued just as effectively as someone selling you a defective drill. As with so many things in life, this basically comes down to money. If a company or person wrongs you, they are now compelled to compensate you financially.
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