I would say with the bad group thing there are two things that massively improve your chances: A) being group leader and B) sometimes being okay with doing a majority of the work and just asking people to do cleanup. I’ve had so many projects go faster from doing all of the hard parts of the project on the condition that they make it look polished.
Just to provide evidence, you can see the impact of corporate profits and the unit cost of products during COVID-19 in this study:
Corporate profits were a majority of the driver of cost of products during a literal pandemic when people were suffering and needed cheaper goods the most. The pandemic caused inelastic demand to increase and so companies took advantage of a global crisis to line their pockets.
Definitely check the SMART status for uptime when you receive them. Make sure you can return it before you buy it as well
Yeah I totally get that. I’ve been fortunate enough to have teams where at least half the other people gave enough of a damn haha