Quote:
Originally Posted by Jammer
Sure tools makes my point well. We have a Home Depot here. They used to sell USA made Black and Deckers at a certain price, and now they have switched all of thier power tools to ones from China...
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Well, there's my point: what did Black & Decker make, 20 years ago, that you could buy in your local hardware store? Drills, Skil saws, maybe a sander or router. If you wanted anything more complicated/specialized, you had to go to a specialist and pay big bucks.
Now there's a simple element of practicality here. For someone like me, with just a home shop, it's just not practical to go drop say $500 to $1000 on say a drill press that I might use a few times a year. But if someone makes one I can buy for $100, then I'll buy it. Even if it's not top professional quality, it'll serve my needs.
That's where the Chinese got their entry to the tool market: not "unfairly" competing with US companies, but by recognizing that there was a market that those companies weren't interested in serving.
It's really not that much different from US automakers, who've never been real interested in building small cars - it's not that they couldn't build them, but that they actively don't want to, so much so that when they're forced into building a small model, they deliberately sabotage its chances of success with low quality, poor performance, and so on. Which leaves me in a bind: if I want to do the "Buy American" thing, I'm stuck driving a car that I dislike.