A big part of it is myth. And, I'm far from being a Luddie hugger. Everything is relative when it comes to less-than-perfect products to come out of a factory. A 1% defective product occurrence from a company that manufactured 10,000 drums would be 100 drums. Rate that against 50 pieces of defective product from a company that manufactured only 1,000 drums. The smaller company had 5% defective product or five times the defective product rate of the high volume manufacturer. Sure......the manufacturer strives for as close to zero per cent of production to be less than perfect. But, stuff happens. And, a lot of "defective" product is not defective at all, but not acceptable by a merchant or consumer who, for some reason, does not like the sound or the cosmetics or something else about an item that many other people will think is just fine.
The laptop computer I'm using to type this post was returned to the store by a consumer for some reason. The store's authorized service center checked it out, and found no problems. Since it had been sold once, unboxed, reboxed, and returned, it was available for less than half of the retail price with full manufacturer's warranty plus two more years of the retailer's warranty.
The company I worked for sells many thousands of guitars and amps in a year. The product failure rate is well below 1% for guitars, and almost as low for electronics. The quality control diligence is increased significantly when a new production line or hand work shop comes onboard. An increase in items rejected by the QC people is expected in the beginning. The stories of Ludwig's quality control issues immediately following the Beatles' appearance on Ed Sullivan make for entertaining reading. I suspect that there is more legend than fact in those stories.
