The Common Law of Business Balance is a meditation on price attributed to John Ruskin. It reads as follows:
- "There is hardly anything in the world that someone cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price alone are that person's lawful prey. It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money -- that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot -- it can't be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you will have enough to pay for something better."
This is a classic quote on the possible folly of automatically choosing low cost as the best way to make a purchase decision. It appeals to those who believe, or who want to persuade others to believe, that price is a possible indicator of quality.
Famous quotes containing the words common, law, business and/or balance:
“What the study of history and artistic creation have in common is a mode of forming images.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)
“The law isn’t justice. It’s a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“The business of love is
cruelty which,
by our wills,
we transform
to live together.”
—William Carlos Williams (1883–1963)
“As deaths have accumulated I have begun to think of life and death as a set of balance scales. When one is young, the scale is heavily tipped toward the living. With the first death, the first consciousness of death, the counter scale begins to fall. Death by death, the scales shift weight until what was unthinkable becomes merely a matter of gravity and the fall into death becomes an easy step.”
—Alison Hawthorne Deming (b. 1946)