Hot Wheels Quality Control (Or Lack Thereof)

Here's the deal: you go to the store and you're looking forward to finding some cars, especially the ones that you wanted for a while but you don't have in your collection yet. You glance over them for a bit, go to checkout, and leave. By the time you get home and bust your car out the package, you find some flaws. A paint chip (or two) here, a scratched window there, and some tampos that are a bit off-center. You don't wanna admit it, but you are kinda bummed out. If you had some intentions on customizing it, that's different. You're just going to strip it anyway. But if you had intentions on leaving it stock, then you would feel like screaming in disgust.

Now you could say, nobody's perfect; factory flaws are inevitable. That might be true, but in the last ten years or so, Hot Wheels just doesn't give a fuck anymore. At least on their basic mainline items. You could also argue, why care so much about the quality control on little toy cars that are only made to cost one dollar? That's a pretty lame excuse, because when I was a kid, the cars had way better quality control back then, even on the mainlines. Very rarely did you find a car that had some flaws on it. Of course, Hot Wheels didn't make as many cars back then as they do now, but I still think that good standards are still doable. That only leaves one more thing left to explain: the factories.

Mattel has certain factories for different product lines within their vehicle brands. They make the Hot Wheels mainlines in the Malaysia plants, and make the higher-budget Hot Wheels premium cars in the Thailand plants, at least mostly. And as you can imagine, the Thailand cars usually have a higher degree of quality. If they cost around $3-$5 dollars, they better. And although Matchbox doesn't have the output of Hot Wheels, you can tell the fit and finish on the Matchbox cars are way, way crisper. Malaysia, on the other hand, is garbage. Of course, they are the cheap cars so quite naturally, they have the most flaws I have ever had, and it ain't even funny. Seriously. I'm not gonna sit here and say I know everything that goes on in those factories, but it seems like everything there goes out the door unchecked. Even the China plants are trash, because I had more than one car from the Red Line Club that had flea bites on them, and you pay a shit ton of cash for those memberships too. Highway robbery indeed.

And that little "Guaranteed For Life" warranty they put on their cars? It's bullshit. That's just to cover their asses so they can stay cheap and lazy.

In all fairness, I do understand how it is to work on an assembly line; I've been on one myself, so I can imagine how it is to make thousands of little toy cars a day. It truly is boring, monotonous work. So you try to get it over with as fast as you can. However, when you bring home some flawed cars after a long day of hunting, it feels like you trick-or-treated all night long and found some fucked up candy from your bag. So bad, you have no choice but to throw it away. Shows that you really can't win for losing. 

Damn.