[Christ]

Originally Posted by jamesqf

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.

I compretery agree.