Main > Everything Else
I can guess why electronics are cheaper in Japan, but....
BadMouth:
I cut back on the cheap stuff from Hong Kong when they started making me sign for it.
I'm not home when the mail is delivered, so I have drive to the post office and stand in line to claim it.
It's a lot of hassle for a sub $2 item.
I've gotten some <$0.50 items (including shipping) from Meritline in the past. :lol
RayB:
Unionized American postal worker: up to $25/hr
Chinese postal worker: Probably pennies.
zolveria:
Yes while a lot of electronic are cheap. One must be careful because many people do not know and purchase
toys and other items that they may use to put food and and end up killing themselves..
I also fall short of buying in CHINA a lot of my kids xbox.. tools electronic..
Hey America needs to keep the factory work here... but we are to expensive.. in the long run CHINA might end up
ruling us LMAO.. we are making them RICH/ :angry:
Howard_Casto:
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. Again, it's just economics. When you don't pay your workers as much and don't give them as good a health plan you can put more money into the actual product. Also a lot of these "American" products are still made in China, they just get a fancy American name slapped on the front. So buy buying the Chineese "knock-off" you are simply buying the exact same product without the fancy name and added cost of branding and tarriffs.
On of these days the country is going to realise that our contries strong suit has always been invention and patents and try to help r&d firms and idea men instead of fighting a losing battle to keep factories open. We could turn this whole boat around, we've just got to literally work smarter and not harder.
MonMotha:
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.