The policy of cheapness is an effort to spend a minimum of money, but to get the maximum in quantitative form. For example, a person prefers to spend a certain amount of money on the purchase of low-quality things in larger quantities than to spend the same amount on a smaller amount but of higher quality. However, such situations necessarily lead to the worst consequences. A striking example of this phenomenon is Bryant Simon’s The Hamlet Fire. Here he describes a poultry farm fire that occurred in 1970, where 25 workers were killed, and they were black. The moral of this story is to show people about excessive addiction to cheapness, where the quality of everything they do is subsequently lost. This company had a low salary, poor working conditions, and a generally disrespectful attitude toward workers and their work. All this means cheapness, which subsequently led to the fire of this factory. This essay discusses Bryant Simon’s The Hamlet Fire and claims that overpayment is a consequence of addiction to “cheap” and the hidden cost of America’s addiction to “cheap?”.
Analyzing the tragic fire in North Carolina, Simon argues that such a phenomenon has become a pattern of the American industry in undeveloped areas. As it turned out, cheap work, food, and life do not lead to development and prosperity. On the contrary, people’s lives are devalued, and their quality of life is reduced. Simon also makes it clear that greed leads to poverty. The case at the poultry farm for Simon is an excellent example of how to explain the conditions that led to the fire. In other words, the passion for cheapness is precisely the condition that led to the fire. The cause of the fire may even be a bad attitude towards employees. For example, employees could not complain about workplace conditions, and they were required to work hard. Otherwise, they were fired, and a fire could arise precisely because of the fatigue of employees and someone who made a mistake at work. The more people resort to cheap, the worse the consequences.
Ultimately, people have to pay very dearly for resorting to cheapness. The hidden cost is that such a phenomenon is an illusion. Deceiving their minds that this or that job is cheap, people do not want to understand that they will have to overpay for such a passion. Ultimately, the desire for cheapness leads to even higher costs in production. Such a phenomenon can be called the economy’s collapse for the sake of the economy. Such an economy, where there is no production quality, can only expect a collapse. Black people worked on the poultry farm, meaning their lives did not matter. In other words, the employee’s work and his life did not carry any value with it. This phenomenon brings with it a hidden cost in that production and people, in general, had to pay with the lives of twenty-five people for such a culture in the economy.
In conclusion, Bryant Simon did a brilliant job of studying the consequences of cheap living in the example of a tragic fire in North Carolina. The passion for cheapness and greed leads people to even more significant losses. In addition, cost savings devalue people’s lives, leading them to even greater losses and decreases in the quality of both production and people’s lifestyle.