Tag: quality

Tienda Inglesa: from class to trash

Tienda Inglesa: Lo bueno por menos

Classy may be too strong a word, but Tienda Inglesa has been for me the best of the handful of “large” (remember, Uruguay is small) supermarket chains in Uruguay.

Back in 2012, Tienda Inglesa sold LED lights imported by Renovables S.A., a wide-ranging and impressive Uruguayan renewable energy business. The owner, Rolando Ringeltaube, told me how carefully their company monitored quality control in China. And, he told me, LED bulbs should have a life of 20 years. Which, considering the history of incandescent light bulbs, seems an unlikely prediction. Still, they have to last longer than these mercury-laden compact fluorescents that seem to last about a year, no?

So imagine my surprise when an LED light bulb I bought there died after three weeks. They have a “no refund” policy, but thought about it a couple days, and gave me another. Which also died after three weeks. Once again, they reminded me of the “no refund” policy, but gave me a credit after a few minutes. Meanwhile, I walked to the lighting section to examine the packaging. Sure enough, they are now imported from China by Tienda Inglesa. No middle man. No quality control.

LED bulbs are great (10X more efficient than incandescent), but the Tienda Inglesa LED bulbs are now officially trash. Consider yourself warned.

Extremely poor quality LED bulbs sold at Tienda Inglesa in Uruguay

Walmart wisdom™ comes to Uruguay.

Update 5 January 2017: the latest Tienda Inglesa garbage LED light, acquired 3 December 2016, has started overheating and malfunctioning today, after 33 days.

Es lo que hay, ¡Uruguay!

I spent enough years in the USA to be predisposed to a gung-ho, get-it-done attitude, and a respect for quality products and services, so a couple of things here stand out for me.

  1. Tolerance of mediocrity: Chinese electric hand tools with a two-month warranty that cease operating after three, for example. Well, you might say, it’s poor country. And you’d be right. But you won’t find anyone here who disagrees that lo barato sale caro — false economy: cheap things end up being expensive. *Shrug* Es lo que hay. That’s what it is.
  2. Lack of situational awareness: as with people at peak season who pause in the exit door of the supermarket to have a conversation, or bicyclists, motos, or pedestrians who cross streets without looking. And let’s not forget cars.

Here’s a photo that presents a lovely illustration of both.

Es lo que hay, Uruguay.

The lady who apparently owns but doesn’t live at the end of Syd’s block had a hissy fit about the growing brush pile on her corner (but on the town right-of-way). She decided an appropriate response involved tearing the pile apart so that brush blocked both streets. Who did what next remains a mystery, but last week we returned from walking dogs to see two guys loading brush into a truck. Leaving Syd’s 5/6ths of the dog pack inside, we walked down to see if they’d be similarly taking away the 2+ year old brush pile next to Syd’s house. They indicated they would. Excellent!

They added that the current brush pile would require a second trip.

What you’re seeing in the photo is, left side, the remaining half of the brush pile. The blue and white stuff beyond is the non-brush trash that they carefully removed from the brush pile. The blue thing beyond that is (and was) an empty trash container that could have easily accommodated the trash they separated from the brush pile.  But apparently for them when your job is to pick up brush, it doesn’t include leaving the street clean.

The rest of the story, as you might guess, is that they haven’t been back.

I’m guessing they will. Eventually. Meanwhile, es lo que hay.

Sanders: my experience

No, not Bernie.

I’m making another 1-meter hanging shelf for under the kitchen cabinets. I bought a piece of 1″ x 10″ pine, a bit longer than needed (so I can trim the ends square with my table saw, since the good ol’ boys at the aserradero don’t quite grasp the concept of “right angles”). Then, of course, there’s lots of sanding to get rid of various planer marks. Fortunately, I have a hand-held belt sander that makes quick work of such chores. At least until almost finished, when it suddenly stops working.

Well, with not much left to do, I wasn’t bothered at having to use my much-less-competent palm sander. Well, to clarify, much less competent when they both work. Instead, I found it to be equally competent: instead of sanding, it just made noises. Might as well have been dead as the other.

A few days later (today), I decided to tear into them and see what I could.

Disassembled hand sanders

The palm (orbital) sander, to the left of the screwdriver, was hopeless. Something’s jamming the central shaft, and I have not a clue what (nor why it didn’t the last time I used it, a while ago). A path forward wasn’t immediately evident.

On the belt sander, however, I found it is activated by a double-pole switch — basically two switches acting together, one for each incoming live wire (and they’re both live in Uruguay, so I tend not to do “simple repairs” to light fixtures or outlets without first turning off the entire house circuit). Easy diagnostics revealed one switch wasn’t working, so I installed a jumper wire (turquoise “U” at lower right) so that the connection is always on, and — ta da! — it worked, and I replaced twelve screws that hold the two halves together.

Turned it on, finished my sanding job, turned it off — uh, no. Now the switch is jammed “on.” But guess what? I don’t really care! Unplug it to turn it off. It works!

I won’t be tempted to tear it apart again because, being a cheap no-brand tool, the screws that hold it together anchor into the plastic molding of the other half. They were all nice and tight when I undid them, but only a third of them really firmly reconnected. The others just turned and turned.

So it may end up being held together with wire and duct tape. But it works — !

I’m feeling more Uruguayan all the time.

The kitchen lighter

lighter

We bought a used gas barbecue grill without a functioning lighter. So I bought one of these for a few bucks. I was amazed how quickly it ran out of gas. Taking it apart, I see that, even though it has room for a regular lighter’s worth of gas, they’ve made the tank smaller. Because they can. Because you can’t see it. What a rip!

So I’m back to turning on the gas and throwing a match through grill. *POOOMP*

Speaking of getting it wrong

A friend pulled off the road in a quiet neighborhood of Montevideo to make a phone call. As he was talking, a local woman decided to park in back of him, something she proved incapable of doing without slowly but forcefully driving into the back of his car, trashing it.

The body repair people put the Suzuki label back on, but off-center. The next time the car went to the dealer, they were so upset that the logo was off-center — to the left — that they “fixed” it.

Quality control in Uruguay
A shame, really, that there‘s no easy way to determine the centerline of the car.

 

 

 

¡Milagro!

OK, not exactly a miracle, but feels like one after buying plastic ice trays that start breaking within a few days: orange ones purchased at Disco supermarket.

orange-ice-tray

Even after ten days in the land of low prices / high expectations (that would be ‘Murka; Uruguay being the land of high prices / low expectations), I still joy in something as simple as cheap orange ice trays that eject intact ice cubes — the entire tray! — and have shown no sign of cracking after several weeks.

My exciting new calzados con Velcro

cheap shoes, Uruguay

Oh boy, you’re thinking, he’s really lost it now.

I know: shoes with Velcro are not exciting. But in Uruguay, cheap shoes that fit me are exciting. And most of what’s available is size 45 or less. These are 48. And they fit. And they cost under USD 30.

The ones I wanted they had, surprisingly, in 46, 47, and 49, but no 48. They called another store a few blocks away (I thought I’d been in every one in Pando already), and told me someone would bring a pair in size 48. Which they did, though the only similarity to the others was the color.

I have a special disdain for Velcro shoes, our nemesis in our early days of doing school author presentations. Well, not the shoes in fact, but the combination of the shoes and the kindergarteners in the front row who couldn’t stop sticking them and loudly unsticking them. I sometimes felt like screaming at them, WHY DON’T YOU BRATS LEARN TO GODDAM TIE SHOES? But I didn’t.

My neighbor Manuel told me that going to Pando used to be the butt of jokes in Montevideo, since it was popular for its whiskerías (whorehouses) and hourly motels. It’s significant for us because they deliver for free (the stores, not the whores): Montevideo is farther, and through the toll booth.

While in Pando, I found a 20-tube solar water heater with a 3-year guarantee for USD 675. So maybe one day soon I’ll actually get to do a hot baking-soda-magnesium-oil soak in our expensive bathtub.

My excitement today in Uruguay: cheap Velcro shoes. No, really.

The sausage machine

Inspired by local expats who have started making sausage, but not by their product or prices, the kid decided to make his own, and diligently cranked and cranked and cranked with a neighbor’s manual grinder. Lot of work.

making sausage, Uruguay

So when we found an electric one at Tienda Inglesa, we said why not and shelled out some bonus points. The kid cranked it up, and it worked like a charm!

poor quality appliance, Uruguay

For an hour. Unfortunately, not completely unexpected with products sold here.

Ñuke: wretched Argentinian wood stove

We recently bought a new Chilean wood stove with a five year guarantee.

It replaces the poorly designed, ugly, poorly built Argentinian Ñuke (great name, eh?) that we have had two and half years.

With its top removed, you can see (lower arrow) an air channel for secondary combustion that was completely filled with rust flakes, and (top arrow) a triangular air tube whose top was almost completely rusted off. I bought fire bricks in a local supply yard to replace the ones the Ñuke chimney cleaner broke and never replaced.

We’ll probably find a use for this in the campo now that we’ve finally taken possession of our farm land and remarkable little house (more to follow).

Speaking of which, I’m thinking of writing a(nother) book: 14 Acres and No Clue.