If something is made ‘over there’ and brought for sale here, you may rest assured that the US company that contracted for it made a decision that this is what I can sell in the US market.
As noted before, USians want everything they see, and they want it cheap, cheap, cheap. They will cry a river when their cheapest-in-the-store product fails to last forever with zero maintenance, but, when it comes to buying a replacement, they will, again, buy the cheapest thing in the store.
Several decades ago, there was a TV series called “Secret Life Of Machines”. A couple episodes dealt with home appliances where the host pointed out how the products have been cheapened over the years, shoddy, flimsy, materials substituted for more robust ones, but that is what people buy.
Remember when TVs came in a nicely finished wood cabinet? Now, nothing but a flimsy plastic housing.
It’s true! Some of them literally want to pay nothing, and instead of shopping for cheap Chinese stuff, go dumpster diving instead.
Ayup. I walked out of the RS one day to see a car parked next to the store’s dumpster with one guy inside the dumpster, handing stuff to his partner to put in their car. We made a point of smashing all the product that we threw away, so the dumpster divers couldn’t get much for it.
Apparently, one or more of the dumpster divers took offense at our smashing everything. Ron arrived one morning to open the store, and found the door lock cylinder filled with crazy glue, and a note “thou shall not smash the things you throw away”.
That is a special sort of chutzpah, to be stealing stuff out of a dumpster, and retaliate against the people who threw the stuff away, because they didn’t throw it away in operating condition, or at least in good enough condition to bring it into the store and demand a cash “refund” for the junk that had been found in the dumpster.
Same sort of nonsense at OD. Guy bought something, I forget what, then brought the box back for a refund. After the guy had the cash and left, the store employee looked in the box, to find, not the new item the box was supposed to contain, but an old RS phone answering machine, put in the box for ballast. Another guy bought a new WD hard drive. Then brought it back for a cash refund. The store sent the returned drive back to WD. WD sent the drive back to the store with a note “this is not our drive”. Looking closely at the drive, we discovered the perp had peeled all the labels off the new WD drive, and glued them on the old drive, so it would look right to casual inspection, but all the ICs on the board had “Seagate” printed on them, so the guy got a free HD upgrade.
Don’t you just want to shoot people? Grab that old M1911A1 and empty the clip into whatever they are using for a brain?
