Main > Everything Else
I can guess why electronics are cheaper in Japan, but....
Samstag:
--- Quote from: Howard_Casto on December 07, 2011, 12:54:03 am ---Well I hate to say it, but in general at least, much of the stuff you buy in China is of a higher quality than similar products made completely in the US.
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At least we still make better chopsticks.
Wait, what?
HaRuMaN:
--- Quote from: Samstag on December 07, 2011, 10:08:02 am ---
--- Quote from: Howard_Casto on December 07, 2011, 12:54:03 am ---Well I hate to say it, but in general at least, much of the stuff you buy in China is of a higher quality than similar products made completely in the US.
--- End quote ---
At least we still make better chopsticks.
Wait, what?
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It's not that we make them better, we just have a lot more access to lumber.
Vigo:
--- Quote from: Samstag on December 07, 2011, 10:08:02 am ---
--- Quote from: Howard_Casto on December 07, 2011, 12:54:03 am ---Well I hate to say it, but in general at least, much of the stuff you buy in China is of a higher quality than similar products made completely in the US.
--- End quote ---
At least we still make better chopsticks.
Wait, what?
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And the guy making the wooden Chopsticks is Korean, yet in Korea they prefer metal chopsticks.
ark_ader:
Why when they seem to do pretty well with just their fingers...
Howard_Casto:
--- Quote from: MonMotha on December 07, 2011, 01:22:43 am ---Quite the contrary. If you're going to bother paying US labor rates, you need to get something for it. Generally, this means you need some sort of niche high-end labor that is difficult to find or manage in China. The Chinese are getting better (quite rapidly), but the US, Western Europe, and Japan are still king when it comes to highly skilled labor in top of the line facilities. Most of my high end tools and electronic test equipment really is made in the US, Japan, or Germany. These are items that can easily run several kilodollars. On a product like that, paying Ted $200 to get it all right the first time is cheaper than paying Xinhua 50c to flub it up repeatedly due to poor training and facilities resulting in a pissed off customer and several RMAs. Now, again, the Chinese are getting better and better as their industry gets more advanced, but their labor rates for such advanced manufacturing aren't a ton better than those you find in the US. All that training and QA equipment costs money. Eventually, the actual time you pay somebody to sit in the chair and do the job becomes somewhat irrelevant.
Also, it may not be obvious, but volume production *is* a type of R&D. You learn a *lot* about something when you try to make a million of them, and that information is not efficiently transferred from offshored manufacturing facilities back to the R&D department. If you're doing something that needs minimal training, doesn't need high end equipment, and is in a very established field, you have little reason not to seek the cheapest possible labor costs, but if you're closer to the cutting edge, having a close link between manufacturing and R&D can be very valuable, perhaps more so than many managers realize.
I wouldn't advocate trying to make 10c electronic widgets in the USA, but I fail to see why we shouldn't be making high end microprocessors, for example.
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We'll we DO make high end microprocessors, in fact most processors are still made in the US or Japan.
But I don't think you understand how low end products work. You churn them out and sell them. If they break the consumer is screwed. Therefore quality is irrelevant. Also low end products are so much cheaper in China that a US seller can order 5-10 for the price of one, and expect the consumer to return it multiple times.
When nobody else has the means/know-how then the product is made in the US but IMMEDIATELY after it becomes possible to make the product in a "lesser" country like China or Mexico the bulk of production is going to be moved there. It's cheaper and most corporations only care about money, there is no "fixing" that. So companies chruning out the same ancient-tech based products year after year shouldn't complain when the Chineese take their jobs, especially the unskilled labor on the production line. The key to keeping a US factory in business is to continually chrun out new cutting edge products that other countries simply can't produce. The minute you sit on your laurels and rely on the same product is when your whole labor force gets canned.
So like I said, R&D is where it's at and production doesn't mean squat. You can of course carry a US-based production force on the backs of the R&D guys but only in the way I described above.