shoddy
adj.made or done very badly and without care. You use this to describe work or products that are poor quality and might break easily.
adj.characterised by poor craftsmanship or inferior materials; lacking care or attention to detail. Often used to describe physical goods or professional services that fail to meet basic standards.
“The repair work on the roof was shoddy and leaked immediately.”
“The investigation revealed that the building collapsed because of shoddy construction and a lack of safety inspections.”
“While the marketing campaign was polished and expensive, the product itself was a shoddy imitation of its competitors, leading to a swift decline in consumer trust and brand value.”
Typically used to modify nouns related to work, construction, or effort.
“Piggott’s a shoddy, unkempt idiot – he sleeps in his suit and at one point, he eats a raw Findus Crispy Pancake – but he saves the girl at the end.”
* Unknown, but possibly from shoad (“loose stone and rubble; fragments”), equivalent to shoad + -y; or possibly from the Arabic word for reuse. Shoad was of inferior quality for building. * The modern adjectival sense was apparently derived from inexpensive shoddy (“fabric from wool-processing byproduct”), which was not really suitable for (but was sometimes still used for) things such as military uniforms at the beginning of the US Civil War.
Etymology adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.