We are where we are doesn’t mean anything. But we ought to know, so we don’t go there again.
I first went to the USA in 1984. It was America, just like in the movies. I bought an old Chevrolet. I taught kids to shoot on summer camp. I *cough* ‘parked by the lake.’ I nearly got myself shot by the police. I dated a cheerleader called Nancy-Jean. So far, so road movie. I was in heaven.
I saw signs everywhere for things made in America. Pendleton coats, a faded painted advert on a brick wall in Eagle River, from a time when they were definitely for working stiffs, not an Amerind virtue-signalling fashion statement. My car was the definition of Made In America. It was ludicrously big, crudely finished, fatuously thirsty and sounded great.
I went back in 1997, twice, to New York for work. I went to DC and San Diego again in 2003 on two trips and then to Cupertino and Denver the year of Katrina.
It wasn’t the same at all.
Over nearly twenty years I didn’t expect it to be. What I also didn’t expect was how much shopping would have changed. The first time I went it was hard to buy anything that wasn’t made in America. The last time I went it was hard to find anything that was.
For one reason, the same one that’s bugging me here in the UK today. Call it globalisation (as if it’s a new thing, not something we had two hundred years ago and which defined London, Glasgow, Liverpool, Bristol and pretty much every other port in the UK, and certainly every port involved in the Great Slave Triangle (rubbish UK goods out to Africa, sell them/exchange them for slaves, take the slaves to the New World, rum, coffee, sugar back to Blighty). You didn’t know? Really?
We always wanted to buy it cheap. Cheap become the obsession. In places like China wages are a small fraction of the amount you’d have to pay someone in the UK to stand in a factory. Their idea of copyright law seems to be that you make it, we’ll copy it. Then try to sue us and see how far you get. Quality control is to say the least, variable. And the returns policies are a joke.
I bought a converter plug for my new MacBook a couple of weeks ago, because suddenly all my USB plugs don’t fit the oh-so-tiny Thunderbolt plugs the Mac has, which magically do electricity as well as data stuff. I’m so old that a Thunderbolt as an American airplane, if it wasn’t a cowboy hero’s horse.
Long and short being that it didn’t work. Surprise! The one for £2.99 worked fine, even after I bent the end of it. The one that cost £20+ that did ten other things as well didn’t do them as well. Or at all. Or anything, really, except cost me money.
No problem, email and tell them.
Last time I had a problem with a Chinese IT stuff supplier they told me as a special deal they’d repay me the postage so I didn’t have to send it back and I could leave it there.
I emailed to ask why I’d put up with that as their product didn’t work. They emailed me back to say they didn’t make a lot on them, and basically, take it or leave it.
This time they asked for a video of the plug not working, so a technician could have a look. It doesn’t really need a technician to look at a home movie of a plug not working to see that a plug isn’t working. But the inference is clear: you’re doing it wrong.
But there probably wasn’t an inference to be made, other than: “We don’t speak English very well.”
Which is fine. I don’t speak Mandarin at all, so they’re one up. Now if I could just stop doing the English thing, and the American thing: buying it cheap then wondering why it isn’t made the way it used to be.
For anyone saying ‘don’t buy Chinese stuff, they gave us corona virus’ (and there are just such people, dear reader), a question. Do you want to maintain a totally false sense of prosperity by being able to buy cheap rubbish in Poundland, or not? And you do. It’s better than asking real questions about the economy, productivity, investment and incomes, after all.
