It was bound to happen. (see link below)

Keep putting suppliers under tighter and tighter cost constraints, and quality becomes a casualty of the price war.

Instead of bullying suppliers into adopting so many one-sided stipulations -- on shipping, handling, and pricing -- perhaps our big box retailers could give their manufacturers a little breathing room to address safety and other important issues that fall by the wayside when price and delivery are the only things that matter.

Certainly, a couple of magnets and sensors at the tail end of the pill packaging line could have detected these metal chips before 11 million contaminated bottles were shipped. But when the entire focus is on pleasing the purchasing agents and not the customer or the process itself, who's going to be inclined to think about such things?

Maybe it's time we count the real cost of "rolling back the prices"?

Acetaminophen recall

So they're saying the pills contain "portions of wire one-third of an inch long." I wish companies were motivated in some way to explain how the process would introduce such contamination. Wire?

Not to mention that those big-box stores that roll back prices depress the economy of every community they enter. There's a huge cost in human terms as well, when you consider lack of benefits, low wages, poor working conditions, and so on, and the fact that the community has to take up the slack. Another cost is the loss of mom-and-pop stores that offer personalized service. One day we're going to wake up and realize how much those neighborhood places are worth.