Defining beauty

As Confucius put it over a millennia ago, everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it. Surely enough, all of you dealing with used and refurbished electronics have faced problems considering the grading – or the “beauty” of which I speak – of products have thought something similar at some point. Both the variety of grading systems and the difficulty of clearly defining the value of smartphone inventories lead to frequent confusion when not discussion between otherwise reliable partners. These are not easy problems to solve. First, when it comes to the variety of measure systems in play in the current daym there is no magic. We must come together to accept a fixed grading standard.

Easy to say, but to change the modus operandi and vocabulary of hundreds of companies and thousands of professionals will require time and determination from all of us given that today, virtually each company is using its own grading system to describe their own inventories. Secondly, we need to come up with a metric that is capable of conveying the real status of the devices without blind spots that can avoid confusion. It also needs to be a simple and intuitive system in order to catch on in the industry.

This is not a simple task as one might think; the issue here is that when describing a device in perfect condition (for purposes of this argument, let’s call it an “A”) is quite simple, the device is operating in top order with now marks or blemishes on its surface. Conversely, a low grade on a device (perhaps a “D”) would denote that the device is to be used mostly for parts or recycling. The problems come when attempting to give a grade to any device that falls between these two extremes.

To illustrate this, we decided to make a practical case and ask some of our partners about a specific case of a mobile phone in which the screen is unblemished, light scratches on the cover, and home button has visible wear. How should this phone be graded when most people do not even agree on what the definition of “light scratches” is, let alone how to decide on a grade when taking into consideration deterioration of the home button in tandem? We asked five people and only two of them agreed on a common meaning.