The true cost of cheap products: The city hall employees had put up with poor lighting at their workplace for far too long: gloomy corridors, flickering fluorescent lamps, and no emergency lighting or outdoor lighting. And the monthly electricity bills were enormous. Finally, it was decided that the building has to be renovated. A lighting expert analysed the status quo, produced a new lighting strategy, and drew up a plan to implement this. Once workplaces, corridors and access paths were fitted out with new energy-saving lights the situation improved markedly – until problems arose some three years later. • One after another, the energy-saving lamps, which had a purported lifetime ten times that of traditional lamps, simply went out. • The remaining lamps grew dimmer and dimmer. And although the strategy had promised lower costs (over the entire lifetime of the lights), the overall costs were so high that they threatened to more than outstrip savings made by cuts in power consumption. What had gone wrong?