Can you charge double and still keep your customers coming back?

The problem is that 'buying quality' is very hard to prove.

For important purchases, like a car, there may exist guides that give you good record of past performances, but for most thing, its mostly hearsay. "Oh, I've been buying from X for years and they never break."

The race to the bottom has the property that paying less is an easily provable fact. You can measure it. Quality is too hard to measure.

There is also the possibility, for some classes of goods, to purchase the cheap ones and fix the bad bits. Like purchasing a cheap laptop and replacing the HD with a SSD.

Yeah, German companies are typically managed in a much more bottom-up fashion than US companies. Labor isn't just an input to be managed, it's treated as an active player that can be cultivated to produce product improvements and gains from productivity/loyalty in the long term.

This occasionally leads to some bizarre cultural "impedence mismatches". Volkswagen tried to organize a workers' council at their plant in Tennessee, and were rather dumbfounded at the blowback they received from both workers and politicians alike. The workers' councils are a normal part of their management process, they never figured it'd be a problem.

Of course this is very much a case of "physician, heal thyself". There are tons of BS management practices in the tech world - stack-rank is the first thing that comes to mind. And big tech companies like FB and Google are known to be colluding to hold our wages down. We're skilled workers, overall we're a prime target for organizing. But we're notoriously hard to organize because of our culture, and it's really tough to see how to change that.

Historically it's always been the case that workplace improvements are demanded, not given. The beatings will continue until morale improves, unless we act cohesively.

The US has almost no precision machinists. Those guys are in Germany, Swizterland and Japan.

There are all sorts of things you can't build over here or in China because we don't have the people who can do it precisely enough.

I used to own a few Miele mountain bikes, made sometime in the late 80's early 90's. They were hand me downs from my Brother and Brother in Law. Canadian bikes. The company folded a while ago.

Like many such companies, the name was bought from a Taiwan/Chinese company, to slap on whatever bikes that come out of the bike factory - the same factory other more known name brands come out. Frames from these companies are the same/very similar to those same brands; the components can be a bit dodgey. For more,

http://www.bikesdirect.com/‎

(not that I recommend anything on there)

Good start to an argument! I would have added Rivendell (rivbike.com) as a very reputable maker of bicycles. On the topic of German know-how, though, I turn to my favorite topic of bicycle headlights. Why can't Americans make them? You can buy a lot of very fancy, very expensive bicycle lights made in America that are all crap. Every one of them has a useless circular beam, like a flashlight. As an exemplar I give you the Light & Motion Urban 800, very popular in San Francisco, $150, completely fucking useless[1]. From the Germans we have the B&M Ixon IQ[2], comparable in output but with proper optics, casts an even beam on the road ahead without blinding oncoming riders, $55.

1: http://www.lightandmotion.com/the-perfect-light/on-bike/road... 2: http://www.bumm.de/produkte/akku-scheinwerfer/ixon-iq.html

Just do not get a Miyata, as its just a name slapped onto frames, and accessorized with cheap components. The name itself was sold long ago. The original Miyatas were great bikes.