– Alana Semuels, The Atlantic
^ 40% of merchants are in China but the percentage of goods made in China is likely much higher maybe like 75%.
I’ve done small-scale importing from China for a retail business. The quality of the product you receive is generally related to whether the seller is concerned with repeat business in the future.
I do the same with ties. If I need a specific color for a wedding party and I never plan on wearing it again, to China/Amazon I go. A single tie from my much smaller “I’m definitely going to wear this repeatedly” collection costs more than the ten others I’ve purchased from Amazon. The cheap Amazon ones are practically falling apart after two parties, but it doesn’t matter because that second party wasn’t part of the plan. My upside is saving a few hundred dollars on ties I won’t wear.
The core problem is rather huge currency imbalance. Anything done in US, including quality assurance, is hugely expensive. The Gap has to pay massive executive and retail employee salaries in dollars and have stores with rent in dollars. The currency imbalance benefits merchants on one side and consumers on other side.
Xiaomi and Huawei make phones that are quite comparable in quality to any of the established western and Korean brands; Xiaomi also apply their brand to a lot of very good electronic stuff that's very good value - electric scooters, air purifiers, smart home equipment etc. Rigol and Aneng make consistently good test equipment at a fraction of the price of western equivalents. Japanese brands used to dominate the radio control hobby industry, but they have been almost completely displaced by Chinese brands.
Surely you mean in their race to survive in a bona fide market environment with low barriers to entry, low product differentiation and no switching costs to customers, right?
'Cause the alternative was to throw in the proverbial towel and close up shop.
It wasn't innate greed that caused jobs to move overseas – it was the end of the Cold War, the advent of instantaneous communications and significant leaps in logistics processes and technologies.
I'm not judging the companies. It's more a statement about American consumers who (probably like everyone else in the world) always care more about price than where the good is made (and things correlated to that, like labor laws, toxicity, etc.).
The companies simply followed their guidance. But, I would assert that these companies didn't fight that hard to keep ownership of their manufacturing, and it was a profit decision, and all that has put them in a difficult position.
It's easy for a six-figure income earner to "buy local", but sadly, low-income workers are the ones most inclined to buy cheap goods produced abroad. In doing so they contribute to wage stagnation that disproportionately hurts them, while boosting profits to capital holders – who also happen to pay capital gains taxes and not income tax... – creating this perverse feedback loop.
Unfortunately, as an armchair economist I don't see a Real Solution – maybe you need Real Economist for that.
Whatever the solution may be, it doesn't seem we're doing much more currently than hunkering down and hoping wage gains abroad eventually lead to less inequality between US workers and third-world country workers so that the economics of offshoring invite companies to place jobs back in their home countries.
I literally have trouble sleeping at night thinking about this (combined with a fear of perpetual economic stagnation in Europe which I don't think we talk about often enough)
They've got nothing too.
When you buy a $4 bikini you are taking a quality-related risk though, and a lot of the time, shoppers are correctly aiming for quantity, not quality. Personally, if I buy a $4 anything direct from China I know I'm taking that quality risk, but it's prospective risk: Periodically I want to broaden my horizons and check to see whether I'm being gouged or not, or just see if I can let my buddies know about something that is worth it at a surprisingly low cost. Given a product category that's been around for a while, that's important if you'll be buying a lot of stuff in that category.
I do this sometimes with simple electronic components, antennas, things like that. However in most cases the original/heavy-QA item is obviously way better, and in the case of electronics, maybe it's made in the _exact_ same factory, but the firmware, materials, and overall quality is simply worlds ahead of the afterthought/low-QA product. Yaesu released the FT-4X and FT-65 radios which are a great example of this, made in the same factory but far superior to the Chinese-brand radios (I own both and use them frequently). Nagoya and Comet and Diamond antennas "can" be cheaply replicated but surprisingly given such simple parameters, the result is periodically complete junk.
But much of the time, it's not complete junk. It's in the middle somewhere.
So the question becomes: Would I like "good enough" and _three of them_ (like three antennas for several radios), or "best on the market" and one of them. I personally find that I have some "best of market" needs like participating in a local emergency exercise, and in other cases maybe I just enjoy a low-key hobby and having access to just-OK equipment means I can string multiple devices together and have some broad-minded fun as opposed to the deeper, quality-focused type.
IMO it's good for consumers to know about both mindsets, and yet I think many more do get this than the HN crowd will credit. American companies were also warned of this shift long ago and a lot of them sure seem to be doing OK maintaining their competitive advantage. We are now in the information age and America is a cultural-informational dominator.
You think they could sell just as much product to the American market using cheapflashlight.cn ? Come on..
See companies like Suitsupply, for example.
This being said there's a movement back to locally made in the US and Europe in the mid/upper range. The customer "connoisseurship" culture eventually made people more aware of things like fabrication quality, its relation to price and the trappings of branding.
You can have a lot of garbage come from Aliexpress and still come out ahead.
It's interesting to see how brands are positioned differently in different markets. IIRC, Stella Artois is the PBR of the UK, but without the hipster cool, while it's relatively premium in the US.
Other places, Walmart might be pretty good.
I've bought counterfeit books from Amazon where the text bleeds due to poor inks. As well as low-quality paper from "international edition" textbooks instead of the high-quality paper I'm used to. Worse yet: a counterfeit copy likely is "pirated goods", where the Publisher / author don't get the money. (The main point of buying books is to support the author, more so than perhaps the text itself). It was fine when I was a student and needed to save money, but my personal library has no use for bleeding books printed on poor quality paper. I only have two bookshelves (for books) in my house, I don't have enough room to keep all the low-quality books.
Branded goods are often slightly miscategorized or mislabled on Amazon. I'm talking 2300mAh Energizer AA vs 2400 mAh Energizer AA. In these cases, I was trying to match up battery packs for electronics, where its very important to get matching NiMHs, but the Amazon Marketplace merged the two battery types ("close enough" isn't good enough for me). I now buy my electronics products from Adafruit / Digikey, two stores which understand the importance of documentation and precise SKUs. Commodity AA NiMHs I buy from Home Depot, which have been properly labeled in my experience.
Finally, Walmart prices are actually pretty fine, and sometimes beat Amazon's. A good example this past month was when I bought a Cast-iron skillet.
* https://www.walmart.com/ip/Lodge-Logic-Seasoned-Cast-Iron-12...
* https://www.amazon.com/Lodge-Skillet-Pre-Seasoned-Skillet-Si...
I made sure to shop around for the lowest price, and lo-and-behold, Walmart was cheaper.
> You can have a lot of garbage come from Aliexpress and still come out ahead
Do you trust the preseasoning of a Cast Iron skillet to a cheap no-name company? I guess if you're planning to strip the cast iron skillet of its seasoning and you're going to oil it up with Flax Seed oil yourself... its hard to get the "Cast Iron" part wrong. Its the pre-seasoning process that you're buying in this case.
Lodge's pre-seasoning isn't the best, but its type and quality is well listed and documented: Soybean Oil (http://www.lodgemfg.com/use-and-care/what-is-seasoning) . That's good enough for most people, and its probably too much of a bother for most people to find higher-quality oils and season the pans themselves.
Buying the brand-name has benefits. Final bonus points: Lodge Cast-iron is still made 100% in America, for those who care about that little detail. But the brand name trust is a benefit.
There's lots of people who review and discuss Lodge's choice of pre-seasoning, so its a well known constant. Buying no-name brands on Alibaba is a risk: you pretty much have to do quality-control yourself.
Perhaps I'm obsessing too much over the quality of a $20 pan. But frankly, if I can't trust the pan's quality in my kitchen, its complete garbage to me. I have enough cheap pans in my kitchen, I'm spending more time throwing out broken kitchen appliances than buying new stuff.
I mean, sure, I could risk it with maybe a $5 or $10 pan from Alibaba instead. But why should I even risk it? Lodge has high enough quality, is highly reviewed in cast-iron enthusiast online discussion, and is widely available.
It's worse than that. With random chinese jank, you don't know if that "cast iron" pan didn't include pot metals. I heard that lead, cadmium, and other heavy metals were "tasty". Because they, like iron, leech into the food. Fortunately, the amount of iron that leeches out is diet-wise necessary... Whereas lead - not so much.
I wouldn't risk a free "cast iron" pan from anywhere China. Or India. Or the South Pacific countries. There's too much at stake(steak) to ingest in things that have little to no: QA, testing, laws, quality standards. Not worth it.
But pure cast iron is just that: Iron. Iron isn't "pure", it will have varying carbon content and other metals. But these metals (and other materials) all have far higher melting points than Lead, so Cast Iron itself is probably lead free (otherwise: the metallurgy process probably would fail if you didn't purify the Iron Ore enough before casting it)
The simplicity of the design and manufacturing is one of the reasons people buy pure, classic cast iron skillets. There are strong guarantees built innately to the casting process. The iron doesn't need to be particularly high quality either for the pan to work.
Higher-quality metals (ex: Steel) are somewhat against the point of cast iron. Steel pans are smaller and thinner, but the point of a cast-iron skillet is the huge weight which slows down the cooking process. A cast-iron skillet is slow to heat and slow to cool down, because its made of super-heavy iron. Aluminum or Copper Frying pans have a similar issue: they are so lightweight that they won't make the same kind of sear as a classic cast-iron pot.
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But I think you have a point about lead-worries in Ceramic-enamel Cast Iron products like: https://www.amazon.com/Lodge-Enameled-Classic-Enamel-Island/...
The paints and ceramic composition are far more ambiguous and subject to quality-control issues. Lead used to be very common in a variety of paints
Though typically one would use a cast iron pan for savory items more than sweet ones, so I have my doubts about intentionally adding lead.
[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/sugar-of-lead-a-...
Also, there are only so many ways you can put a bikini together. The Chinese should have learned this by now. Or they can simply hire an Italian fashion student for a small price.
And it's working well for them.
But why doesn't it exist in many product categories ? Why it's so hard to find a list of similar Chinese brands for different product categories ?
I observed a progression going like this in my hobby (firearms and accessories):
1. No Chinese goods. Expensive US and European brands dominate the market.
2. Chinese goods enter by extending their airsoft product lines, and quickly dominate the "cheap junk" market. But there's a huge gap in both price and quality between them and older brands. Older brands still retain a large part of the market, because the quality of that new stuff below "good enough" in most cases.
3. Small companies that don't have an established brand name and compete on prices start outsourcing to China and offering products at "made-in-China, QC'd-in-USA" prices, with warranty, tech support etc. The prices are now about 1/3 of established brands, unlike the junk before that was at 1/20. This creates a whole new market segment, which takes away a lot of customers from those brands, because it's past the "good enough" bar.
4. Large companies jump on the bandwagon to compete. You start seeing essentially the same design with minor cosmetic changes being rebranded and sold by various companies. Because this is fairly obvious in the age of the Internet, the value of the brands diminishes.
5. Chinese suppliers find their way to the American market, and start selling the same stuff directly, offering comparable warranties and customer support, but at even lower prices. New brands get established in this manner (e.g. Holosun).
6. Chinese brands start targeting the high-end market, and adding exclusive features for their own products, that are not available in generic product lines intended for rebranding (at least, not until sometime later).
The industry was around #1 up until mid-2000s or so, and it just got to #6 about a year ago. Anything that's not made in China is squeezed into narrower and narrower niche at the top of the market. Holosun got to the point where they are making $1K+ electronics that is competing against $2K+ equivalents by established brands - in other words, they're already contesting for the part of the market way above where most customers are.
Chinese manufacturers and retailers are moving up the value chain as fast as they can, but it's not an overnight process and no-brand goods aren't going away.
[0] e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfyAjkPIYyc [1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO8DQrSp5yEP937qNqTooOw [2] e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZh7VfxBmcw
One packet from a factory came with each product individually wrapped in aluminum foil like a child did it (and probably did) and each product was still coated in a sheen of gross machine grease. That was the worst out of a round of Alibaba buying of maybe 20 SKUs.
There's also a big world out there and the discount that comes from buying products of poor quality is more appealing than the quality itself. There are, in fact, many ways to make a bikini.
As for QA, if they aren’t trying to build a brand with repeat buyers, QA is simply overhead. Even if they are, they might not have the foresight or management experience to implement QA correctly. The lack of merit-based management talent is a huge problem.
I've been working in OEM manufacturing for 12 years, with short brakes for college and freelancing stints.
Answer to that: quite a few do, but it is very hard for higher quality Chinese goods to reach Western markets. It is that entire global trade mechanism that was built on trading nothing, but "cheapest shit" that is working against them.
Often, it is the original Western OEM client that insists on bargaining to the last cent, taking cost cutting down to such silly things like thickness of plastic parts, paint quality or borderline electronic component rating.
In worst cases, the appallingly low quality of a product may even be an intentional design decision by the buyer:
When I was an exchange student in Singapore in 2010, I worked in a trade company. One of our clients was another sourcing company that allegedly worked for Amazon.
So, those guys come to our office to check what power supplies we have for them. They pick apart our samples saying things along lines:
"Sample A has too high spec parts, they don't need to last that long. Plastic on sample B is unnecessarily thick. Sample C has non-essential stress reliever on the cable and the cable itself is way too thick..."
Why would a Chinese company try selling quality stuff to the West if no sourcing agency employed by American MNCs will pick them up? There is no incentive for that.
A western OEM can overpay and still get bad quality. Unless you are willing to send your own QA people over there, you aren't going to get the quality you want. Anyone who successfully outsources in China is very hands on about it.
> "Sample A has too high spec parts, they don't need to last that long. Plastic on sample B is unnecessarily thick. Sample C has non-essential stress reliever on the cable and the cable itself is too thick..."
That's also true, but in this case they are at least working with their customers on costs, not promising something for a price they can't deliver on and silently cutting corners later on to make up their margins.
> send your own QA
Rarely... what American big co. managers understand under "sending your own QA" is usually something like:
1. Hiring a lawyer "doing" that
2. Lawyer company hiring a manufacturing auditing company
3. Auditor company hiring an inspection and certification expert
4. That expert company finally hiring a professional services company which sends an underpaid engineer temp to finally visit the company and do a 5 minute check.
It sounds absurd, but I've seen that way too often, few times with things happening in this exact sequence.
Being hands on about that is the key. It is not rocket science, but so few are doing that... almost like if C-levels of American companies get some kind of "yuck factor" dealing with Chinese.
Those guys have it almost as an unconscious impulse to hide behind a wall of 10 legal counsels and other agents whenever anything involving China has to be done. Before coming to the West, I could not have imagined that it is even possible to hire an attorney for doing something like that.
I do not doubt this for a second.
OTOH, recently we've even seen quality on Apple's Mac products deteriorate noticeably. Assuming Apple is extremely good at this strict QA, I wonder if some sort of China manufacturing sea-change has occurred.
First, you proclaim loudly the minute PRIME failed.
Second, you reject the shipment on that you needed it within that time quote.
Third, you initiate "did not receive".
Fourth if Scammyzon balks, chargeback.
Before somebody can buy something directly from China, the person have to know what they can buy... You know, entire business empires were built entirely on knowing what and where to buy.