What's In a Tool? a Case For Made In the USA (hackaday.com)

szczys writes: You have the choice of buying a wrench made in the USA and one made in China. Which one should you buy? The question is not a straightforward one. Tools are judged by their ability to do the job repeatedly and without fail. To achieve this, only the best of design and manufacturing will do. But this is a high bar when you factor in price competition which often leads to outsourcing production. Gerrit Coetzee looks at this issue, comparing two instances of the same model of Crescent brand adjustable wrench; one a legacy manufactured in the USA, another outsourced for manufacture in China.

Comments

Re:Crescent won't learn

[Culture20]

As a tool user, I'll admit to buying from Harbor Freight for the things that are intended to be used up. You can't beat their deals on "rotating tool (compare with Dremel!)" heads which are designed to get used up anyway. But their tools that are supposed to last? The hammers loosen after the first few hits. Your options then are to take them in for the lifetime warranty replacement, or hammer another shim in the top. Their other "lasting" tools aren't that great either. Although they do have the biggest adjustable wrench I've ever seen (at over four feet long), I'm sure if you need something like that regularly, there are better ones online that cost more but are worth it not to break while you're turning whatever giant bolts you're turning.

Re:Capitalism in practice...

[Penguinisto]

There are a great many human values that an economic system could promote. Capitalism got none of them.

Problem is, in practice, neither does any other system we've tried in human history.

Re:Wish the analogy transferred

[Dcnjoe60]

I believe if we were to make one in the USA at this point in time it would be about $2,000 instead of $700.

Toyota and Honda don't charge a price differential for cars made in the US versus those made in Japan. Why would Samsung?

Re:Big corp. execs think they're clever

[FrozenGeek]

Some years ago, the president of the company I worked for wrote a book on his management philosophy. In it, he noted that you should always be using your current job to leverage yourself into a better job and that if you were in the same position for more than 2 or 3 years, your career was stagnating. If that's a typical attitude for upper management (and I suspect it is), these folks are not making foolish mistakes. They are maximizing profit to leverage themselves into a better job somewhere else. If, after they move on, their former company craters, it's simply proof of how good they were.

Socialism does just fine

[rsilvergun]

anywhere it's been tried. What you were probably thinking of is the many, many Fascist Dictatorships that happened to use Karl Marx's books for rhetoric (Russia, China, North Korea, etc). Democratic Socialism works just fine, thank you very much.