AS CONVENIENCE GOES UP, QUALITY GOES DOWN

Every time we have a cocktail party, I seem to be caught in an endless pattern of running to the ice bucket and replenishing ice in half-consumed drinks. Being an former efficiency expert, I have calculated that for every ice drink I serve, I make an additional 1.6505 trips to the ice bucket for fresh cubes. It always happens right when I'm in the middle of telling a good story. I look up and see two or three people waving their glasses at me, as my wife gives me stern looks while jerking her head in the direction of the ice bucket. It's gotten so bad, I hesitate to invite people over for drinks and appetizers like I used to.

Then one day, something miraculous happened. The icemaker in our refrigerator broke the day before we were to host another gathering. At first my wife was frantic, calling all over town for a repairman. But this was Friday afternoon and everyone was all booked up until Monday. She calmed down when I told her we could buy a few bags of ice from the grocery store. Then I had a brainstorm. Why not simply make ice cubes the old-fashioned way, with ice cube trays? We rooted around the kitchen, searching through seldom-opened drawers and cabinets until we found two plastic trays and one aluminum jobby. After washing them all out, I filled the three trays and turned up the cool knob in the freezer compartment. Every three hours, I emptied the trays into the bin and refilled them. I kept this up until 11 PM and started up again first thing Saturday morning. By noon the ice cabinet was filled, but I kept going, filling more plastic containers as the day wore on. By 7 PM, we were loaded with ice.

The party was a big success, especially for me. I got to tell all my stories without interruption. There were no guests waving glasses at me. There was no wife sternly jerking her head toward the ice bucket. As a matter of fact, I was able to serve everyone all evening long without once having to replenish anyone's ice. Oh, I mixed and served many second and third drinks, but there was only one instance of adding ice cubes to already-served drinks – for a lady who thought her white wine wasn't sufficiently chilled. Being an former efficiently expert and all, I calculated that my switch from icemaker cubes to handmade ice cubes reduced my added ice service per drink from 1.6505 to 0.0250. Keep in mind, it would have been zero if the wife had chilled the white wine a little more. It was obvious that the handmade ice cube was larger, denser and more durable.

This got me to thinking. If ice cubes made by hand are vastly superior to machine-made ice, what other things are we over-conveniencing at the expense of poor quality?

Anybody who's ever driven a stick shift car knows that an automatic transmission drains the zoom and lowers the gas mileage. We trade in automotive power and efficiency and get ease of shifting in exchange.

Once, when I had a food company consulting assignment, I got my wife to prepare packaged biscuits for a Sunday breakfast. The brand's regular version was dry as toast. The higher-priced biscuit was an improvement, but no winner. It wouldn't displace toast. The highest-priced entry was so big and greasy, you didn't even have to use butter on the cookie sheet. While eating the big things, grease ran down my sleeves in rivulets. But I will say that all three biscuits came out looking exactly the same, or stamped out of a machine. Exasperated with all this, the wife made biscuits from scratch. They didn't look as smooth and perfect as the packaged biscuits, but did they taste good. Not too dry, not too greasy. Just right. A sure toast-beater.

Supermarket ice cream is another negative quality trade-off. Sure, you can buy high-butterfat content “premium” ice cream brands and “super-premium” brands, whose ice creams are filled with all kinds of extraneous junk like chocolate chunks and a myriad of candy-like textures. But if you really want quality ice cream, you have to go to an ice cream specialty shop that hand packs. You get some gal or guy with monster wrists and forearms doing the packing and you end up with an incredibly dense, flavorful ice cream. It's not full of air like the supermarket brands. And the flavor is so rich and good that you don't need a lot of silly ingredients suspended in it.

Instead of nailing roofing members to wall frames, a lot of builders have found it to be more convenient and cheaper to substitute staple guns for old-fashioned hammers and nails. In turn, the wall frames are no longer properly bolted to the foundations. The home buyer doesn't see any difference and the stapled homes are a little cheaper. That's largely the way homes were constructed in Homestead, Florida, before Hurricane Andrew kissed the town in 1992. Roofs lifted off like airplane wings, and walls were wrenched off their foundations. The devastation was incredible.

But then news photographers noticed something peculiar. Amid all the devastation, there were 12 or 14 homes which were entirely undamaged. Further investigation found that the undamaged homes had been constructed by Habitat for Humanity, using old-fashioned hammer and nail techniques and traditional methods for fastening walls to their foundations. For people living in Homestead, the convenience tradeoff was very, very expensive.

My friend Tom bought a minivan with an indicator light which comes on when the car needs servicing, even for something as inconsequential as an oil change. Unfortunately, the dealer all too frequently forgets to reset the light properly. Two hundred miles after an oil change, Tom's indicator light went on. A long way from the dealer, Tom brought the car into a service station that quickly and easily switched off the indicator light. The bill was $60 – a stiff price to pay for an indicator light we have been easily doing without for one hundred years.

Worse yet, the average automobile is filled with computers designed to give us incredible levels of convenience. But buy a car with a defective chip and you could end up dead on the highway. And as viruses are spreading from computers to cell phones, we can expect that sooner or later, a virus will infect the computers in your car, rendering it helpless.