Front page headline in this week's (June 23, 2008) "Tire Business",
> published by Crain Communications.
>
> "Huge recall of valve stems is underway"
> When will the American consumer rise up in protest over this Chinese crap?
They won't.
What will happen is that the cheap Chinese stuff will go up in price to match what else is on the market, and the high quality stuff will drop in price to try and gain market share against the cheap stuff. Eventually it will all be similar in price and impossible to differenciate quality from junk without making the purchase first.
The problem is that the cheap stuff will do for most folks, lasting just long enough to get the task at hand done. The quality stuff lasts forever, so companies producing it don't make as many sales.
Its hard to know when a third party is doing the buying, but I for one ALWAYS look for a "made in China" label on anything I buy, and immediately try to find an equivalent part made elsewhere. I just told the NAPA counterman "no way in hell!" when he brought out Chinese-made brake rotors for my Jeep last saturday, for example. The unfortunate thing is that its nearly impossible to find some parts made elsewhere, and definitely for anything less than triple the price :-(
And worse, there's a lot of fraudulently mis-labeled stuff out there too- cheap made-in-China parts in faked name-brand boxes.
Sometimes it may not be easy, but it can be worthwhile to find out in cases like this.
I dont buy odd name brands, for one. I stick with Michelin or companies that (I think) I know.
You can look for the "Made In XXX" stamp on the articles. Ask the store representative. Dont buy a pig in a poke.
A while back there was a big brouhaha about the Chinese tires that were imported to the US under certain quality provisions, and the Chinese changed the manufacturing process without alerting anyone. These tires started to fail, and the Chinese refused to take any responsibility.
This can be really dangerous.
Just before I retired, I refused to accept any product samples of chemicals from China because they would not entertain our QC tests and specifications. Fine with me if they dont want to spec their materials, but I damn sure didnt have to evaluate nor buy from them.
Steve wrote in news:u4OdnYPOUrY0BPbVnZ2dnUVZ_o snipped-for-privacy@texas.net:
It's much more complex than that.
You can have a steel part made in Red China with American rubber surrounding it. And you'd never know.
The carbon black in that American rubber likely came from China. And you'd never know.
You can buy an American candy bar with Chinese soya lecithin in it. And you'd never know.
That American-made bacon you had for breakfast this morning? It likely had Chinese nitrite in it. And you'd never know.
You'd never know because the finished good is labeled Made in USA (or Canada, which is the same thing).
Chinese-sourced food and non-food ingredients make up a far larger portion of Chinese imports than finished goods.
Almost everything you buy has some Chinese origin, even if it says "100% American made".
It's a little-known (except in the trade) fact that certain very cheap commodities (vitamins, emulsifiers, vinyls, colorants, and many other obscure substances) that are critical parts of American finished goods are often sourced from Red China.
The funny thing is, about 99.9999999999% of the finished goods containing Chinese components give nobody any problems of any kind. You literally would have no idea because there is no problem.
Even funnier is that Red China labor rates would be climbing quite lot higher and faster than they are if the Communist tyrants running China were not so selfishly bent on preserving their own power, and if they were not so willing to beggar their own populace in order to do so.
You can blame the Chinese Commie state-capitalists for greatly aiding Western private capitalism. How utterly ironic.
That is somewhat true.. The American capitalists dont really give a shit about American laborers (if there are any left). They take cheap crap from China and sell it here and around the globe. And, they claim they have done you a favor for getting cheap prices.
Cheap aint worth a damn if you dont have a job and income.
Some of the Chinese pharma products have been disastrous. And we still pay out the kazoo for them because the capitalists have price controls to pay for "research". What crap.
This is such a complicated story that it cannot be covered in one or two posts.
"HLS" wrote in news:bxVak.9432$ snipped-for-privacy@nlpi069.nbdc.sbc.com:
Do you buy goods and services not made in your home town, or not on your street? Then you don't give a shit about your home town or your street, obviously. You are therefore contributing to unemployment in your home town or on your street.
What if there was a lumber yard in your town but you went to one in another town because their 2x4s were cheaper?
Would you be a traitor to your town?
If this were true, there would be higher unemployment now than in 1890.
And some of the American pharmaceuticals have also. But China's problem is its lack of freedom, especially press freedom.
What capitalists have what price controls? Only governments can impose price controls.
Congress here in the USA, at the action of the pharma lobbies, have maintained a system which allows the pharma companies to charge exhorbitant prices for medicine. We pay more than any other country in the world.
I have nothing against capitalism, so long as the playing field is somewhat level. In our specific case, it is not.
In order to import a product to the USA doesn't a USA company, or at least a company with operations presence here have to ORDER such product, and in order to communicate the REQUIREMENTS of the product aren't SPECIFICATIONS and internationally recognized STANDARDS normally used and included as a regular part of the import process?
All the banter of the "Cheap Chinese products" and our armature attempts to define a reason or rationale for their not producing "High Quality (which also means "Higher Purchase Price") which for some reason always end up with one of to answers that we seem to be comfortable with: 1) They don't have the knowledge or technical know-how to do it right, or 2) Those darn folks thought they could fool us, why lookey here at what they sent.....golley gee!
How soon we forget, or maybe some of us just didn't pay attention in history class. Post WWII Japan had the label of "That cheap tinny Japanese stuff...", interestingly enough often thought by USA buyers likely due to the fact they just didn't "Know How" at that time, but did we buy it, every bit. Have they expanded, targeted their markets, refined their requirements since then? We all know the answer to that one I would think. More recently, the electronics boom and the PC era: Would you be surprised to find Korea to be the leaders in large format flat screen displays, and how many parts in your PC or MAC you are using right now are NOT made in Taiwan, or at least somewhere Asia in general.
If you think that for one minute the Chinese are not capable of producing good quality products and that the factories they are building aren't up to the latest manufacturing and statistical process control technology available anywhere, you are only fooling yourself, if even that. Here I thought it didn't take a rocket scientist to figure that out.....OOPS! Those sneaky folks in China even do rocket science pretty well, golly gee, least we're smarter, huh sarge!
Yes. The problem is that the importers only care about that too.
This is true, and my experience dealing with Chinese manufacturers is that they are very, very sensitive to materials prices and it is very difficult for them to get good materials. You can pressure the plant to use decent quality bronze, but they'll use cartridge brass anyway and they'll try and tell you it's yellow bronze.
There are some things the Chinese plants do very, very well, like PC board fabrication. And there are some other things they do remarkably poorly, including some kinds of precision machining. The things they do well, they do well because the US buyers have demanded they do them well. The things they do poorly, they do poorly because nobody has pressured them into doing any better.
Yup, and this sort of substitution is very common in Chinese factories, and part of what makes it so common is that the people making the products really have no idea what the products really are or how they work. The actual degree of expertise at the plants is very low, and often copying other plants is a substitute for doing actual engineering.
US importers should expect this kind of thing, and they should be aware of it, because it happens all over unless you do your own final quality control testing.
Sad to say, the factories aren't government-controlled much any more. Even the factories that are government-owned. There is just too much pressure to make money for the government to really put any pressure on anyone. If you want to violate government laws, that's fine. You just pay money to someone to ignore your violation. Although the Chinese government may call itself communist, there are few other places in the world where money is king and will get you absolutely anything you want, from a cup of tea to your own laws. Consequently, anything that people can do to make a little more money, they will tend to do.
Yes, they are capable of producing quality products, but they do not necessarily adhere to the specifications and norms that an American purchaser demands.
They have, in the past, produced crap that looks ok but is in fact dangerous.
If you do not hold them strictly and rigidly liable for this, you never know what you will get.
A lot of people have died because of China's lax QC policies.
MotorsForum website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.