Here's a video from Beta, a wrench manufacturer in Italy.[1] Think about what it would take to build a plant like that from a cold start. What you'd need to know. All the ways you could screw up. How much it would cost to recover from a bad decision. Notice what they automated, and what they didn't.
Who wants to be a millwright? Or a production engineer? To build a factory, you need both. Once you've built the factory, you don't need most of them them any more. It's a job with high layoff potential. Top pay is maybe $125K.
You need people who've built your kind of factory before. Here, they need people who've built mechanized hot forging shops. Since few of those are built in the US each year, there's no pool of such people.
Stanley, the company, had forgotten how to build a plant like that.
They relied on the equipment manufacturer, and perhaps some consultants. That didn't work out.
It takes a long time to get a good factory going from a cold start. It took Airbus 21 years before they made a good airplane. It took Tesla 15 years from start to significant production volume.
I've worked in manufacturing, been adjacent to manufacturing for most of my life, and written software for custom factory floor machines.
That Beta wrench factory wouldn't be hard for someone in the industry to stand up. It's is fairly low tech, little automation, and 95% off the shelf machines. Even the two possibly custom machines I saw in that video are built out of off the shelf components.
This really isn't rocket science. You have a list of operations needed to make the product. You take that list and turn into machines, and time it takes to do each operation. If this is slower than your target time per part, you increase the number of machines on that operation (see all the tumblers in the wrench video).
The US has many cities with deep industrial expertise. The US and China are roughly manufacturing output peers, even though the US has 1/5 the population.
I know someone who stood up a production line in the US for some of the most complex pieces of metal ever made, involving hundreds of machine cells, (more many nations have made nuclear reactors than make this thing), and the production line side is something that's just isn't that hard. The planning is work sure, but it stuff that's been done before bazillions of times before.
Standing up a manufacturing line is far less risky than creating new software - assuming you've got experienced people doing it.
The world’s largest tool company couldn’t figure out how to make a wrench.
Stanley Black & Decker built a $90 million factory on the edge of Fort Worth, Texas, intending to burnish the Made-in-the-U.S.A. luster of the Craftsman brand by forging mechanics’ tools with unprecedented efficiency. But the automated system was a bust, and the tools that were supposed to be pumped out by the million are so hard to find that some consider them collector’s items.
I'm not sure why I didn't like your comment but I think its because you're just hand waving the article away without responding to it at all?
You take that list and turn into machines, and time it takes to do each operation.
The article states they had trouble getting the expensive machines running, how do you respond to that? I mean, if the USA does posses all this expert manufacturing knowledge, then sure this wouldn't have been an insurmountable problem?
To be fair, maybe the articles title would be better off "The USA couldn't workout how to build wrenches at an affordable price?", it sounds like the bean counters at Stanley had enough?
Anyway, what's sad IMO is that when I was younger, I remember everyones disappointment that all the Stanley tools, and similar brands started making tools in China and it just seemed horrible and it kind of was, the tools sucked. Now, many Chinese tools seem quite good. Kind of idiotic that needs to be thrown away again and the USA has to figure out how to make good tools again...
Old craftsman tools and various other tools from 30-40 yrs ago have no competition with the current market as far as I'm aware. We sold excellence and reliability to the lowest bidder in almost every single industry. I'm under no illusions, america used to make some terrible products in the past too, but now days half this stuff,even the high end stuff, is designed to go into the trash in 1-6 months... Current lifetime warranties aren't offered because the tools are that good, it's because market research shows you won't even want another one...
Some Chinese tools are fine, but many of them are awful. I talk regularly with manufacturer types, even the raw materials(like steel or aluminum) that come from china can be super suspect.
It's basic economic warfare. China said "screw you, we will make okay enough things at a cheap price so your country loses all of its actual expertise and trades people work at call centers while manufacturing becomes entirely controlled by another country. We will do this at the cost of millions of our citizens for the greater good. Every design sent to us will be replicated and sold for less. Meanwhile we will send our young to your schools to get educated on how to do this better than you, half of PhD students are foreign nationals, and even if they stayed in the US there's no jobs".
Paying the piper in this regard is inevitable. As a country we encouraged everyone to take quick cost saving measures for decades. Germany and many other countries have not Basically our hope is we can cheaply wiggle free by "AI", and not hiring trained experts to do jobs with care and lower the costs by cutting regulations.
We sold every part of everything that mattered to get ahead short term not paying attention to the debt accrued.
I do to the extent that the Chinese will often substitute inferior materials and processes if they think they can get away with it. Documented cases of bait-and-switch between prototypes and early runs on the component, sub assembly and sometimes entire products abound. That's not the way the West normally does business so a whole pile of QC needs to be added to make sure that contractual obligations are fulfilled rather than that non-functional similar shaped and colored stuff gets substituted for the real thing.
This is a massive problem, especially in industries where there isn't a whole lot of margin for error (say, aviation).
Well let's be real, that same thing happens in the US and would happen more in the US if we owned the means of manufacture. Infact, I bet a lot of money it'd be more prevalent until new laws were drafted protecting things. Plot twist our current laws are eroding at a rapid rate...
Have you ever worked in an American industry that makes physical products? Let me give you a hint, it's got the same pressures as software engineering but it's often harder, the environments can be twenty degrees above room temp, and the people get paid a hardly liveable wage.
You can doubt it all you want, but people are out there cutting corners like no tomorrow in pretty much every industry you can Imagine. Usually it's not the employees idea, but rather middle/upper management.
Some of the products people buy have basically never been tested. Yep. Even high end expensive equipment.
I have zero intention of villianizing china. The point was to say, they were smart and employed long term strategies for survival and success. Now they have us pretty much rapped around their finger like how cloud vendors have us locked in.
It's not bad, or evil, it's business we accept every day and are too divided to correct.
Yea take a look at Thousand Currents Programme, now called the National Front Work Programme and you will see the villainy that China undertakes at the govts behest.
I think the difference in what danielvf is saying and what the article is trying to say lies in some higher level phenomenon. Reading between the lines, every issue outlined in the article can be traced back to an abject failure of management to understand what they were making, and why they were making it.
If I had to guess what the root cause was, the talent is there, but due to the current class structure of the US, nobody wanted to listen to the line machinists, grey-beards, and engineers (because they're dirty poors who didn't make it big via psychopathy so they must be dumb) so instead they listened to McKinsey or whoever they hired to actually run the project.
I remember stories from my father about being an engineer at a big manufacturing facility. The culture was engineers were the people who did math all day, but if you actually wanted something done, ultimately you took your drawings down to the floor and found the longest, grayest beard you could and bent the knee until they agreed to make everything actually work.
Fast forward to my first manufacturing job, I was tasked to improve a process, so I went out on the shop floor, started talking to the line guys, and then was promptly scolded by another engineer who told me, and I quote, "they're just manufacturing guys, don't give them enough rope to hang themselves with".
>but if you actually wanted something done, ultimately you took your drawings down to the floor and found the longest, grayest beard you could and bent the knee until they agreed to make everything actually work.
>Fast forward to my first manufacturing job, I was tasked to improve a process, so I went out on the shop floor, started talking to the line guys, and then was promptly scolded by another engineer who told me, and I quote, "they're just manufacturing guys, don't give them enough rope to hang themselves with".
That is a bad way to view things, from both directions.
The line guys definitely have good insights on how to improve things but sometimes their idea of improvement is to "make my job better at the expense of others" and they also often lack the overarching view so they will aim for a local maximum.
Saying that engineers are just doing math all day just relegate the job to a glorified excel data entry job. Engineers should be doing a lot more from documenting current conditions to looking at how to use new technology to improve the process.
That said, I agree that it looks like management did not listen to anyone in the factory.
The engineers know the materials from a numerical point of view, and can calculate to some degree what those materials will do given their dimensions, material grade and so on. But the line guys work with the actual material and know it from an entirely different perspective, how it can be worked into those shapes and what kind of operations will weaken or strengthen an otherwise identical looking part. Forged tools are especially tricky because forging steel is almost as much an art as it is a science due to all kinds of transient effects, you're working the steel into its final shape while it is hot enough to be ductile but not so hot that it loses shape. The difference between a bad forging and a good forging can be hard to tell when the part is done without destructive testing of some sort.
For tools this is critical. The amount of force I can put on a wrench is such that a bad forging will break which will likely lead me to injure myself. But with a good quality wrench I will know I'm safe and will be confident to apply force close to the maximum of what such a wrench will be able to provide (limited by my strength and the length of the wrench as a multiplier resulting in substantial torque on the bolt or nut). Typically the way the bolt would fail is that it becomes semi liquid and this is a slow process so you have some warning to reduce pressure. But a forging that breaks will just snap and all of that force is released at once. Great way to hurt yourself.
So the quality of these forgings is very important and I'd much rather entrust my safety to the people that actually touch the metal than just to the engineers, who may be able to optimize for cost but who don't actually have much (sometimes no) shop experience.
Knowing how to make something in theory and actually making it in practice can be quite far apart, even on something as mundane as what ultimately is a chunk of metal.
I don't believe there is a strong difference between engineering and management when it comes to an operation like this. I'd say there is a dependency on the two?
If America doesn't have the management capabilities, experience and maturity to get a plant going, it doesn't matter about the tech or the engineers, it's not going to workout. This includes having managers of a certain caliber which a large firm would trust with hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on getting factories running.
I completely understand what you mean by the way and sympathize with your view.
I've spent considerable amount of time in Japan and other parts of Asia for business, they have plenty of people with plant management experience who would be able to organize an operation like this. Japan, for example, has off shored a lot, but not everything. Not by a long shot.
The funniest part about Japanese industry is... It was revitalized by an American post WWII by a dude named Deming, who was pretty much hated/ignored by American industry. So he went overthere and made them a powerhouse. Years later American companies were scratching their heads doing anything to hire the guy but not foster the skillset he asked for in his education programs or actually listen beyond being able to market that they took the advice for a few months.
America has triple downed on ignoring experts to maintain order, pay people less, and saving money short term.
When an American company hires 10,000 people it's to bolster numbers or slow competition. When an Japanese company does it's because they need workers long term. When an American company lays off 10,000 people it's because their profitability has changed or the dream wasn't realized. Meanwhile a German company doesn't lay off it's people because it plans to succeed long term and it knows it can't replace it's people, and long term it's more expensive to retrain them.
US employment laws are partially to blame, but most of American industry is a pump and dump...
I think Deming deserves a lot of credit, but don't forget to credit the Japanese as well: to be the recipient of information and that listen to it and act on it is the harder part. Deming didn't single-handedly transform Japanese industry, he gave them a set of principles and ways of working and they absolutely ran with it. Without the second part nobody would have heard about Deming.
Oh for sure. I didn't mean to under cut the efforts of the Japanese people! Infact I meant to raise them up, the US has had every opportunity to do the same and most places have done everything they can to ignore reality in favor of off the cuff thinking by people who have never seen ground truth.
> I don't believe there is a strong difference between engineering and management when it comes to an operation like this.
There can be massive gulfs between the shop floor, engineering and management. In good companies those are bridgeable, in bad companies they are islands that exchange email.
If engineers and management can't be regularly found on the floor and if they don't know the names of at least the foremen then that's a good indication that a company is run in a way that is not compatible with top quality. I've worked with an architect in NL that made a ton of metal structures and he was also the best shop guy they had when they were still small. He came up with the basic ways to build the structures, built all the prototypes and then stepped back and let the real experts take over to scale it up. He knew his limits, as well as their strengths and the end result was a company that really went places. They use a combination of forgings and steel stock cut to length and the work they do is very complex. I don't think they would have been in business for long without managing this relationship between management, engineering and shop as well as they did.
I've seen one other company like that, more recently and they too did this to the best of their abilities. The pride at the quality of their work radiated out from everybody that worked there. It also makes me happy to work with such companies because the alternatives are nearly always painful to watch.
There are many companies in America that are doing this though, and they are successful. Thus it isn't America that can't, but corporate culture at Stanley. This fits my experience at a number of companies, some are much better managed than others.
I was just talking to friend regarding Vacuum robots. It was the first we discussed the issue but we both were surprised how inferior roombas were compared to Roborock.
When I started my research I thought for sure iRobot would be the best. They weren’t they were bested by RoboRock a chineese company.
I’m sure if given the choice B&D would have chosen spending $90 million on a working factory vs. a non producing factory.
Yeah, I second this. If anything, the process in the video is painfully under-optimized. It's not that hard to get to the point where you have a few machines in a lights out warehouse with a skeleton staff somewhere spitting these things out like a machine gun.
I am curious what this legendary machined part referring to is though....?
> If anything, the process in the video is painfully under-optimized. It's not that hard to get to the point where you have a few machines in a lights out warehouse with a skeleton staff somewhere spitting these things out like a machine gun.
This may very well be the trap that they fell into though - at $90 million that implies that they went head-first into scale and automation where actually it can sometimes be better to aim for something less automated as a version 1.0 (humans are more flexible than machinery)
Meanwhile there was that scandal about the steel being sold and used for us submarines was suboptimal. Erosion of standards at pretty much every level...
> This really isn't rocket science. You have a list of operations needed to make the product. You take that list and turn into machines, and time it takes to do each operation.
This is like saying "all you need for an AI startup is to buy a load of graphics cards": there's some details in there which matter and require specialists to get right in surprising non-obvious ways.
I agree with the comment below about this being mismanagement, though. Undoubtedly there are people who understand how to do this properly in the US, but they may not have found them or listened to them.
AI is still a problem under very active development, where the theory is still underdeveloped and the way forward is uncertain. You can throw a lot of money at it and it still may not work well enough.
Wrench manufacturing is a solved problem. We know what to make it from, how to design the parts, what tolerances are needed, how to make chunks of metal in that shape, etc. It's within the reach of a single decently successful youtuber: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FK-0zximxo
The problem is less making the thing and more the commercial side of the operation: will it be cheap enough to compete? Will you be able to convince hardware stores to carry it?
Ops professional here. The parent is basically correct, and I'm not sure this is a fair take on what they're saying.
To wit, the challenge isn't at the functional level, it's at the integration level. The individual elements are well understood, thoroughly developed and available at scale, but the integration for every factory is, on some level, going to have uniquely differentiated elements.
The scoping and management of that is where the challenge tends to sit.
Most of them aren't working those jobs man. And the next generation of them is not educated for it because they couldn't get a job with their degree to learn the trade and had to jump into tech or whoever could help them pay off their loans.
Maybe that person you know did that 20 years ago. USA right now has very little manufacturing plants like it used to have in the 50s to 80s. A lot got shifted out during Bush Jr time. I know a dozen machinists ended with Amazon after they lost their plant jobs around Obama's time.
You're confusing the complexity of the product itself with the complexity of being able to produce said product at scale to acceptable levels of quality. These are not the same thing.
The amount of naivity around this topic is actually scary. Seems like a lot of people really do assume every physical/ made by hand product is easy, and requires no talent or experience. Meanwhile, 90% of the posts on here about tech products end up somewhere along the lines discussing dunning Kruger, and false superiority. The dichotomy is wild especially knowing that when people burn out in tech they often end up working in a skilled trade.
Physical products are hard. Automating them means you've screwed up half a million times and have a lot of cash to even do it.
This! Although I think the most likely failure considering the amount of money spent on the plant is that they probably dove head-first into automation and hit the integration challenges this can have.
(Perhaps a business case of “on-shoring makes sense if everything is automated!” that failed to account for the challenges of opening a fully-automated facility)
Ever see that meme about newcomers to ML make a giant leap to bert/chatgpt? Id wager 100 bucks you're right. Also bet a lot of dudes nephews made a lot of money while being unqualified for their positions.
You have to make those procedures first, and just like software, manufacturing technologies change fast. Each manufacturing technology has its own bugs and a lot of older technologies you can't even hire for anymore.
Now get this, someone could say "we're going to do it with AI from day one!" Blow 40million, to contractors because ew who wants to own their production, and fail. Black box technologies and contractors have different risks entirely.
There's a lot of reasons why attempting to revive thirty year old practices to still be profitable is more than a challenge. Hence why they failed.
I don't buy it. I think what happened is they lead with the budget and timeframe. What good does that do? You get 90 million and 5 years, are you going to actually implement the thing? No you are going to get the perfect hybrid of political lawyerly parasite to suck the 90 million dry and the short timeframe makes it more attractive to the parasite not less.
The explanations make no sense in the article. Automating heat treatment is computationally expensive? What the hell are they talking about? The guy who is doing the heat treatment is not doing computation!
Oh yes who needs to sense and regulate the heat in a place forging, annealing, and quenching various metals while keeping both people and property safe! Also who would want to save money because the energy to melt tons of steel is very cheap.dont even get me started on the HVAC system! It's not like those are prime targets in lesser demanding industries for automation or anything.
But they're very closely related. A complex item is going to have a more complex manufacturing process than a simple item. Have you ever seen how big an aircraft factory is?
I keep getting offered production engineer jobs and the pay does NOT scale with the job requirements. $125k in San Jose for semi manufacturing is the top of that job that I’ve seen, and those jobs aren’t getting filled.
15 years to build a very competitive car and 21 year to build a plane like airbus sounds pretty good actually. It’s actually not that long for a country. It does require a consistent policy encouraging domestic production, some level of protectionism.
In San Jose Cali you could never afford an actual place to live with that. I mean an apartment sure if you compete for it. median home price is 1 million, and average rent is 3k/month. Both of those number are rising btw.
But they aren’t building factories in San Jose, right?
It’s a low/moderate salary in Manhattan too, but no factories there.
So it seems unlikely that anyone would live in San Jose and work this job.
The median US salary in 2021 was about $70k [0]. I’m guessing factories are being built in less than median cost of living places so $120k is 1.7x the median, so pretty good.
Interesting guess find a town a half hour commute from San Jose and the cost of living my guess is you won't see a real improvement. I estimate this from having to turn down several jobs in Cali over the years. The one was almost doable but the commute was an hour and a half because of traffic, and a 10 her work day with 3 hrs of driving isnt sustainable. Especially after I asked how often people pull more than ten hours days...
> 10 her work day with 3 hrs of driving isnt sustainable.
I thought the same thing until I sustained it for 14 years. It’s interesting how perspective changes with circumstances.
When I was in my 20s I remember saying “how do these old guys commute for 4 hours a day.” Then I hit my 30s and had kids and wanted good schools and whatnot, but my income didn’t jump. So I commuted for a long time. Happy I don’t do that any more.
I'm not saying this to be mean but. 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year, 1/6th of the day driving for 14 years is roughly speaking additional 1.6 years of your life spent driving to/from work. Average life expectancy is <75 years in the us. IE 2% of your life was getting to a place to make money. I hope the money really helped your family and they appreciate your sacrifice
Once you ship the dies overseas there is no going back.
Apropos Milwaukee: I had one of their circular saws which dropped from a roof that I was working on and I thought for sure it's a goner. Climbed down, not a mark on it, still dead straight. It must have landed very fortunately but still that was quite the drop. and you'd at least expect some impact damage. There was a scratch on it, but that may well have been there from before the drop and it didn't look like anything to do with impact.
I was an avid watcher of him for a few years until he went off the deep-end with covid and backing the canadian caravan. If he's gone back to what he was good at(teardowns of tools with explanations of the materials and manufacturing choices) I might start watching him again
Yeah he had funny delivery but the COVID conspiracy shit just made me think "is this guy actually saying anything useful or is he just saying it in a funny way?" Was pretty clear it was just the latter.
When he was pulling apart machines and showing me the differences between thermoset and thermomelt plastics, or how much fiberglass was in hardened plastics, or how cast magnesium worked I really enjoyed the guy.
I just didn’t enjoy him enough to deal with him going on a giant rant about how covid wasn’t real and the government was suppressing him from his god given right to breathe on us all.
I checked through his YouTube channel now and he seemed to have calmed down but I am not concerned about dropping him again if he goes crazy conspiracy theorist for his YouTube channel income once more. And that’s without counting how many videos he had showing off his basic chicken rearing or fucking around and failing at cnc milling
He went down the COVID conspiracy and Freedom Convoy rabbit hole? Damn, that sucks.
A surprising number of Canucks went down this rabbit hole, effectively losing years of their lives to these two movements and destroying their social networks and familial bonds.
One Canadian I knew cried for hours every day thinking her vaccinated extended family members were going to die. But hey, every date she listed as when I would die due to vaccine has passed and I'm still alive and healthy! So is her family, much of which is estranged from her now :c
Canada built a much tighter COVID vaccination verification and retail enforcement system than the USA. Vertical integration, few gray zones and such made those who opted out feel like the walls were closing in, as your province's health authority knew your vaccine status, restaurant demanded a valid, ID matching government supplied QR Code to allow seating, and the government was willing and able to enforce the law.
Comparatively, COVID restrictions were created state by state in the USA, and it was such a spotty patchwork that many who opted not to vaccinate lived much more normal lives than their counterparts in Canada.
Much like the universal Canadian deployment of tap and pay, present and pay (the credit/debit card never leaves your hand ever at restaurants or stores), PIN entry for all transactions that would require a signature in the USA, Canada is able to move faster and implement more effectively than the USA.
I really enjoyed how he red circled sub clauses of the sentences he think are important and ignores the rest of the sentence in other videos.
The guy is legitimately impressive at understanding how tools work and the manufacturing put into them, but he’s an asshole when it comes to dealing with society at large
Edit:
Really sells it that he fucks up the tooling on his cnc mill while giving a rant about freedom. This was during his “I can’t actually run a cnc mill yet but am learning how phase” but he was leaning on his previous expertise to sell his opinion on the caravan
>Canada built a much tighter COVID vaccination verification and retail enforcement system than the USA. Vertical integration, few gray zones and such made those who opted out feel like the walls were closing in, as your province's health authority knew your vaccine status, restaurant demanded a valid, ID matching government supplied QR Code to allow seating, and the government was willing and able to enforce the law.
I don't know how you can in one sentence refer to it as a "conspiracy theory" then in the next describe a massive in-the-open conspiracy to coerce people to get vaccinated against their will. Which prior to covid would have been considered a gross violation of medical ethics.
It was absolutely authoritarian response the Canadian govt took. Seizing the bank accounts of protesters and supporters? Abusing state of emergency provisions. Absolutely disgusting and horrifying. I mean your family member went a little overboard but the Freedom Convoy certainly didn't and stood up in the face of totalitarianism, when others cowered and yessired. So props to them.
Now reports and studies are coming out showing the Canadian govt and many other govts way over reacted to COVID.
I enjoyed the real talk and his support of the truckers in face of the abusive Canadian government. It was a pretty popular position there in any case. Boatloads of supporters out in subzero weather proved that. I definitely empathised with all of that. There's reports and studies coming out every week proving him right so....
I guess if you're a more sensitive, tow the line type you may have been put off.
Define boatloads. Canadians going out in subzero temperature also isn’t impressive. They’re used to the cold.
Your articles aren’t convincing me anymore that these were crazies. The second article for instance isn’t scientists saying lock downs weren’t needed but that it wasn’t scientists, and that committee of medical scientists in particular, role to be making wide sweeping changes to society. A completely reasonable position that doesn’t change whether or not lockdowns were needed
What is crazy about not wanting to suffer under an authoritarian regime that would seize your bank account and your livelihood for calling for a change in policy?
> I had one of their circular saws which dropped from a roof ...
Mine went under in Sandy. Still works. I once accidentally ran my old pipe handled hole hog on 240V for a few seconds. That thing also fell from ceiling height down sideways onto concrete, broke the rear handle, bent the hole saw but it kept working. That is a scary drill.
My only gripe with Milwaukee is their corded power tools were redesigned with more plastic so they discontinued the parts for them. My Magnum needs a new brush holder and my screw gun needs a trigger.
I really want their mag drill but too rich for my blood so I bought an import that is meh but does the job.
I'm with Stephenson on that one and it is the exact reason I ended up buying something smaller. I'm simply not strong enough to properly handle a hole hawg and I also don't have frequent enough work to keep it around doing nothing for extended periods of time. The 'smaller' version I have is a Bosch SDS-max capable drill that still makes short work of anything I throw at it but I can imagine jobs where it wouldn't be able to match the hole hawg's capabilities (or frankly, to even come near it). These aren't toys and you should get what works for you, not just what looks impressive.
Another brand I still like after many years is Makita, I've yet to have something made by them break from normal use. DeWalt has lost the plot, they are no longer worth the premium price. And with Bosch it's hit-and-miss you have to do a lot of online reading before making the call on one of their tools. They are very efficient in their use of materials and sometimes they can be too efficient and deliver a tool that isn't up to snuff. But they are always price competitive.
Significant differences between Bosch 'blue' and Bosch 'green'. Makita is universally top quality, I don't know what they sell in the USA though, but what I can get here in Europe is very well engineered and reliable. Fun story: we went through one jigsaw after another of 'A' brands back in the day when Makita was still not well established in Europe. Cutting fiberglass (which is kind of nasty stuff on mechanisms). Then we decided that if they're going to fail anyway let's get something cheap so that we won't cry when we have to toss it. Enter the first Makita tool in the shop. And it just lasted and lasted... for half the price that was a pretty good deal :)
They're not so bad when you have the pipe handle installed, which gives you a lot of leverage over the body of the drill.
That being said, even the cordless ones have an absurd amount of power. At my work we use them to send a 3-flute, 1 1/4" auger bit about 5 feet straight through Douglas Fir (drilling concealed electrical wiring chutes in columns). I've seen them roll a 10' 8x8 (~150 lbs) across the sawhorses when someone forgot to clamp it before drilling.
I played withsome else's hole hawg and I realized it has too much torque for me to work with safely. I'm not physically large or strong and that tool needs a physique to match it if you don't want to end up in the infirmary. I have a somewhat smaller model that does the job as well but that takes a bit longer and doesn't immediately break my arm when it jams.
Indeed. DeWalt used to be great stuff and now it's just overpriced junk. The one thing they still have going for them is their batteries, those are excellent quality. But that's not a good enough reason to buy a tool.
Case in point: I still have a DeWalt drill from 2009's that is still on its original set of batteries. But a hammerdrill I bought for a renovation in 2015 died after moderate use just outside of the warranty and after taking it apart I realized this wasn't an accident but just crappy manufacturing. The mechanism was so delicate it should have never been greenlit and the materials used were sub-standard.
I tried thier ~$100 hammer drill. Failed immediately. Returned and rented $600 version. I learned to stop buying commodity price-competitive tools from Home Depot. But immediate failure of a hammer drill? The Menards MasterForce lasted longer ($50 POS, also returned).
I think the only ones that reach the end of warranty are the ones that are lightly used. Any contractor would go through a dozen of them before the warranty expired, especially if they do a lot of demo work.
Old Craftsman never actually manufactured anything. They just subcontracted out to other American tool manufacturers that built products with their branding. Those manufacturers are mostly gone now due to 30+ years of bad trade policy so New Craftsman can't tap into an existing skill base.
Those companies are still around but they are making industrial grade tools sets for commercial and government customers that are less price sensitive. Craftsman even continued their Made in the USA Tool line for a time under the “Craftsman Industrial” brand. You can still get Made in the USA tools you just have to be willing to pay 5-10x the price. Wright, S&K, MAC, Proto, Snap-on among others all still make tools in the USA
Note the person in that article is completely off on their math. They have a 19% line of credit and seem new to understanding how interest and principal work. (The article person thinks it’s 19%/month and is shocked that they are paying more than the principal in interest).
The loan described here sucks but seems similar to buying everything on a credit card and as a new tradesperson 19% is probably as good a loan as you’ll get without a credit history.
Most credit unions will give you better terms than 19% interest on a personal loan as a teenager if you have not seriously damaged your credit profile already.
These tool loans certainly aren't going out to people that have already rolled the bus on a Capital One $300 credit line credit card.
My credit union will for my kids because I’m a member. But if I’m a new person with no history, they’ll give me a lower interest rate, but only for like $500-1000, so probably not enough to get tools.
Certainly a good idea to shop around but it’s hard to get a $5000 loan with no credit and no collateral.
What I found odd is that I rarely see these tools for sale used. I expect they’d be valuable, but I guess they just get bought up before hitting eBay or Craigslist.
They may have outsourced even the business and management talent for manufacturing and become a mere brand that resells stuff built to spec by others. Shareholder value is maximized until everything is hollow and then it goes to zero.
That's my thought about it too. I'm not convinced labor being too expensive in the US was the reason manufacturing left in the first place. I think it might have just been a cost cutting move to manufacture in Asia which was done more for short term financial gain and designed by financial types. But the loss in talent and knowledge is very costly long term.
This article discusses why the lack of industrial supply chains locally really hurts - the availability of basic parts like custom screws without lead time is exemplary of the problem. The entire chain of production exists in Asia and not in America.
2. Lax environmental regulations make materials, disposal, and energy cheaper (which is really just dumping externalities on others).
3. China for one subsidizes its industries. Corporations can’t generally compete with governments, especially big ones with their own sovereign currency.
This I feel is closer to the reality - craftsman has "sold the brand" so hard that they can't charge anything like a premium, and their quality is now south of Harbor Freight.
It’s easy to shit on HF but some of their products are basically industry standard - like winches and floor jacks. It’s really odd to be honest because people will frequently mention buying something cheap off “Amazon or Ali express” and then scoff at HF. I’ve seen some HF products out perform SnapOn tools in YouTube reviews.
Not everything is “good” but it’ll get the job done.
Daytona floor jacks, good stuff. Icon tools pretty much one step below Mac/Snap on. Cable Porter, Warrior, etc. brand well its cheap and disposable. Pittsburg - well you're buying brass brushes so you use em once and throw em in the fuckit bucket. The names they give stuff do a good job indicating what the quality is.
Where would you go to buy air compressor and accessories at retail but HF? Nobody caries them. I bought excellent standing air compressor at black Friday sale couple years ago!
I love shopping at HF but I've had to learn through experience which of their products are decent and which are utter dogshit. And sometimes I still buy the dogshit if I know I only need the item once and plan to toss it.
Every now and then a crappy tool is exactly what’s needed. Ever had a hole in a countertop but a misaligned or otherwise inadequate hole in the plywood under it? (Or just wanted to drill a new hole through both?). Get a cheap, crappy Forstner bit the same size as your hole, stick it in the countertop hole, and drill through the plywood base. Cuts perfectly and takes very little time. Also destroys the bit very quickly. I don’t think there’s any benefit to using a nice Forstner bit for this. (A cheap hole saw could also work, but some fiddling with the drill bit portion may be needed.)
Obviously one should use a high quality diamond bit for cutting the countertop in the first place, with proper dust control.
buy cheap for the first one and if you ever have to replace it you know you will use it enough to pay for a quality replacement. that way you spend money on tools that need it.
I stopped buying harbor freight tools and went all in on Milwaukee. The productivity boost dwarfed the extra cash I paid...which now seems trivial in comparison to my capabilities with the tools.
> For my purposes harbor freight is where sears used to be
That's very contrary to my experience. I have a lot of tools. Most of my hand tools are Craftsman from Sears back when they were around. Nearly all of them are very adequate quality for a non-professional (i.e. used only on weekends, not full time). Sears hasn't been around for a while but I still have all the tools, all work great.
I went through a phase of trying to save money and bought a lot of junk from HF. Nearly all of it was an exercise in frustration and I've thrown it all away in anger. Soft metal, bad tolerances, pure junk. The only HF tool I have left is a cement mixer. It's not great (the belt keeps popping off) but for my limited cement needs it's been tolerable.
Honestly even their mid grade and above power tools are decent. I have an earthquake xt electric impact that makes short work of suspension and lug nuts.
The main downsides of their power tools is the refusal to make them share batteries and that the decent ones get into the Milwaukee/Dewalt tool price areas.
All "brands" do this now. Rather than selling one thing, they sell a variety in a "Good, Better, Best" tiered system so that a customer is never priced out of buying from them.
TTI does this too: Ryobi (Good), Ridgid (Better), Milwaukee (Best).
The average HF tool is probably expected to survive a single project. If you've ever taken apart any of their power tools it's honestly really sad. Some of the components are average for higher end tools but where they cut corners making them horrible will leave you scratching your head... Literally 10 dollars more could make a tool sold by a competitor for 100 that is sold by them for 20 unnoticeable to most hobbyists... Still not good nor reliable but passing for lay people.
> I think this says more about how badly Craftsman has shat the bed and less about manufacturing in America.
Sorry to burst your bubble. Manufacturing pliers and screwdrivers is a joke when compared to, as an example, manufacturing a cordless drill, battery packs, charger and accessories.
Not unless you are willing to play $500 for it, or much more.
Let's put it this way: If you take the time to create a detailed list of every component, material and process required to manufacture and deliver that product, you will quickly discover that NONE OF IT is made in the US.
In business terms, the supply chain for the manufacturing of such products is long and very expensive, because it isn't local.
Guess where you'd have to buy all the components from? China.
A corollary is that you cannot make this product for less (or even the same) than what it costs to make it in China. Impossible, even if the factories existed.
While people love to talk about "Buy American" there's a huge gaping hole between those who virtue-signal with bumper-stickers and flags and the much smaller group who actually practice --to the extent possible-- what they preach.
BTW, I have attended trade shows where Chinese OEM manufacturers showcase products they make, including tools. To put it in simple terms, anyone can sign a deal with any of these manufacturers and have a line of quality hand and power tools with their own brand and logo. You go to these conferences and can actually talk to and buy from the very companies who are making tools for the top brands in the US and Europe.
But a reminder that this didn't happen by accident. Capital went in search of cheap labor, to increase profits. The cheap(er) labor wasn't in the USA.
We let capital do this. We loosened capital flow rules, we loosened profit repatriation rules, we reduced or eliminated tariffs.
That's not to say that Chinese/Asian companies would never have gotten good at doing this on their own. But the situation we are actually is not really a result of their excellence and/or costs - it's because we elected political representatives who allowed the capital class to fuck us over, and so they did.
I'm much more socialist than the average HN'er, but let's not mistake - they pursued increased profits AND massively reduced prices.
Now we can say the price reduction wasn't worth it and the bang for buck has actually gotten worse as we've made more things more accessible. That the cost of everything being cheaper is that we have to buy more of it, creating more waste, contributing more to climate change, etc.
But ultimately globalization and the move to manufacturing in China HAS contributed to a huge amount of prosperity world wide as geographies that would've never been able to afford certain devices, tools, or even just entertainment before, have been able to.
Using the economists' definition of "durable goods" I would say that for the most part, quality has improved. Cars last 2-3x longer these days. Computers have been "fast enough" for a while and can last 10+ years. Perhaps professional tools have taken a nosedive but my low-end Ryobi tools last essentially forever with light household weekend usage.
Not a "durable good", but cheap clothing also feels way more reliable. Cheap synthetic or cotton/synthetic blends are now comfortable and breathable (which is a relatively new development) and last pretty much forever.
Some things have gotten anecdotally worse. Everybody says that large household appliances like refrigerators, washers, and dryers have really taken a nosedive in quality and/or repairability. It certainly feels true but, I don't know what the actual numbers might say.
But I don't know, man. Affordable crap from 2023 actually feels better than the affordable crap I remember from 1983 or 1993. It certainly doesn't feel worse.
These sorts of change tend to have significant but very diffuse benefits (everybody pays X% less for $thing) but very concentrated costs (areas dependent on $industry being gutted).
I tend towards the idea that the benefits are often worth having, but that the costs shouldn't be externalised onto the workers in question, and therefore regard corporation tax being used to fund redistribution/welfare programs to be justifiable on a market basis as a pigouvian tax as well as justifiable from basic morality.
Yep, the trick of neoliberalism was they reduced worker shares of wages, but they tried to cover that up by reducing the price of commodities (but not fundamentals like land, education, healthcare etc).
In North America, and maybe Europe, the share of worker wages has decreased to the benefit of the elite, but World-wide prosperity has increased DRAMATICALLY in the decades of "globalism" and "neoliberalism"
BILLIONS of people escaped poverty worldwide in exchange for the millions that entered it in the US.
Unfortunately it's not clear what the next step for those billions is. It's certainly not the path that the US and Europe went through for their post-industrial and post-war boom. But what is it instead? It's uncertain and unwritten.
At this point the existential threat to the majority of humanity isn't a lack of clean drinking water, vaccinations, and upward mobility opportunity. It's climate, heat waves, flood, and all the effects that affect everyone across class divides (except the 0.01% in their mountain bunkers)
Well, it's not western-centric to say that they (corporations/capitalists) reduced the workers' share of the revenue or profits. The workers for the corporations that moved production out of the USA and the EU pay their workers a smaller fraction of their revenue than they used to.
Yes, we've done a lot to reduce poverty in many parts of the world. There is a (relatively) furious argument going on, however, about the role of capitalist corporations in that process.
Maybe if stuff was still quality and we didn't have to buy everything multiple times as they break and malfunction, we could afford purchasing more expensive tools and items. And it's not like things are all that cheap anymore.
And on the flip side "We don't need those dirty manufacturing jobs, we will have a service industry" , "You didn't build that" and "Never coming back".
Throw in a dash of "Learn to code" too.
Maybe one day we can sit down and talk about how shitty it is but not until we stop playing Team Red vs Team Blue
Apologies if I'm interpreting/extrapolating incorrectly, but:
We let capital do this [...]
we elected political representatives who
allowed the capital class to fuck us over
Are you framing this as some kind of localized "we did capitalism wrong" mistake as opposed to like... an elemental, fundamental, inexorable aspect of free-marketish capitalism?
Short-term, "fuck the future" profit making is what capitalism encourages. Executives are judged quarterly and yearly, not rewarded for long-term thinking.
Same with our system of government. Relatively short terms for elected officials and the "endless campaign" have some benefits but essentially rule out any sort of coherent future-focused long-term thinking.
This is what our system was designed to do. Any other kind of behavior is anomalous.
Again, I apologize if I'm interpreting you unfairly. I'm ranting at the system, really.
I don't like capitalism much at all, but yeah, I don't think that this particular aspect of it was inevitable.
Judging based on quarterly results is a peculiarly American version of capitalism, and one that has a lot to do with publicly traded companies rather than private ones (which are still capitalist entities in a capitalist system, but subject to quite different incentives and pressures).
I don't think it's accurate to say our "system was designed" to do this sort of thing, if only because 50-90 years, it didn't do this sort of thing. It has mutated and/or the wiggle room within it has been discovered.
Now, capitalism can still be totally wrong or even almost entirely wrong, quite independently of whether "we allowed free capital flow, profit repatriation, no labor movement, etc." is also a terrible long term plan given capitalism.
one that has a lot to do with publicly traded
companies rather than private ones
Are there a lot of private companies doing big things (ie, $90M wrench factories?) out of their own war chests?
I can think of a few examples but my perception is that this is rare enough to essentially disregard... but, I could well be wrong.
Even if a private company does such a thing, it would almost always be via some kind of financing, right? Which creates its own sort of short-term pressure even if it's not as psychotically ADHD as the pressure exerted by Wall Street.
I don't think it's accurate to say our "system was designed"
to do this sort of thing,
I mean, of course it wasn't intentionally designed for this outcome.
But it was designed for rapid and almost entirely unfettered economic growth. Given that, what other outcome was possible?
if only because 50-90 years [ago] it didn't do this sort of thing.
It wasn't possible 50-90 years ago. There were world wars, the seas were not safe, communication was glacially slow or impossible, etc. Also the U.S. was not yet so rich that it couldn't afford to pay its own people to make its own stuff.
> Are there a lot of private companies doing big things (ie, $90M wrench factories?) out of their own war chests?
Ask the Germans :) Anyway, you issue bonds, instead of stocks. You control the term, the "market" tells you the cost. And its a fixed cost. Or you take out a loan, again with fixed interest. You control the parameters as much as anyone else. Or you issue restricted shares, to convince capital owners willing to make a longer term bet to play with you. They have to be in it for the long haul, since they can't sell the shares based on some 1st, 2nd or 3rd order belief about the company value.
> But it was designed for rapid and almost entirely unfettered economic growth
I don't think it was "designed" at all. It evolves subject to various pressures and interests. And since Reagan or slightly before, most of the pressures from citizens (as opposed to customers) have been lifted/ameliorated. Same with pressures from employees. True, we did somewhat increase the pressure from environmental concerns. But at some point, people noticed that extracting value, instead of creating value, was a pathway to riches, and that's where a lot of the big bucks are made these days.
- Are typing on computers that would not exist without capitalism
- Using an an internet that would not exist without capitalism
- Using phones that would not exist without capitalism
- Wearing clothes that would not exist without capitalism
- Living in homes that would not exist without capitalism
- Using furniture that would not exist without capitalism
- Enjoying entertainment that would not exist without capitalism
- Buying food that would not exist without capitalism
- Benefiting from medicine that would not exist without capitalism
- Living lives that would not exist without capitalism
- etc.
It's always interesting that those who despise capitalism never pull-up anchor and move to where they might be able to enjoy something in the range between socialist utopia and flat-out communism. Weird how that NEVER happens and how the vast majority of people actually yearn to live in places where capitalism has managed to --yes, imperfectly so-- raise more people out of poverty than any other system in the history of humanity.
No? Well, then, be an example and get rid of all the things you benefit from that came as a result of dirty-filthy capitalism. Be a role model for others. There's a huge difference between talking about virtue and having it. It's easy to not like capitalism while using your laptop while sipping a latte at Starbucks.
You seem to believe that innovation, and perhaps even production, requires a system in which the investment of capital in a limited liability enterprise is disproportionately the beneficiary of profit compared to the investment of labor or IP (that's all the capitalism consists of).
The things you list above are the product of science, art, curiosity, imagination, ambition, empathy, and hope. All of which can exist (and flourish) without or without capitalism.
Perhaps you make the mistake of thinking that capitalism somehow means "free markets" or "entrepeneurial culture". It does not. Those ideas are orthogonal to it, and can exist with it or without it. They can exist with or without worked-owned co-operatives. They can exist with or without state owned enterprises. They can exist with or without publicly traded shared-based ownership.
Worth mentioning that one can also go to pharma manufacturing and trade shows in China and discuss bespoke bulk synthesis deals and leave with free sample bags of uncapsuled high grade perscription drugs with a "to US patient on US soil" value of tens of thousands of US dollars.
Blame SBD, Craftsman is just a brand name. But yes, I agree.
TTI(Milwaukee, Ryobi, Ridgid) is, IMO, the best at what they do. SBD basically relies on old brand names with a dash of patriotism to exist. Even Chervon(Flex, Skil, Ego) outclasses them these days where they compete.
I tried the new Craftsman V20 kits that came out, and every single tool was problematic. I felt like they were basically just ripping off nostalgic people with garbage old stock. Ryobi and Skil, on the other hand, make stellar tools at a lower cost.
One of the things I appreciated about this article was the subcurrent of lack-of-knowledge. Ok, there was the pandemic, manufacturing problems, supply chain issues, etc. However it sounds like there was a chronic lack of people who had done this before.
When you move manufacturing overseas, you’re not just eliminating jobs: you are eliminating knowledge.
> When you move manufacturing overseas, you’re not just eliminating jobs: you are eliminating knowledge.
Precisely right. And, contrary to what uninformed commenters are saying, that knowledge and experience is lost over time and is incredibly difficult to get back. Even worse, we don't know that knowledge and experience for the manufacturing for a number of modern technologies.
Thought the same, maybe a bit of denial going on, but there's no way if America was the manufacturing powerhouse it's claimed to be, this would've happened. They seemed to struggle getting the expertise to finish the job in any reasonable time frame.
If the foreigners can manage it, clearly there must be other ways of doing it, and they could be copied. The knowledge that has been permanently destroyed was not obviously vital.
When US companies offshored, they typically sent teams of subject matter experts to get the offshore operation up and running at something like the spec. These were the best and most experienced from the US factory. Those guys retired a while ago now.
So now we build a shiny new factory, but are we getting the best and brightest from our now-competition to help us get it up and running? Of course not.
The expertise of offshoring is often a one way street, and once the people that knew are gone they are gone. It takes a few years to get a factory running well from scratch without the kind of experience and domain knowledge that can’t be obtained from education alone.
I think that people tend to underestimate the actual complexity of manufacturing.
It’s hardly turnkey. Every process has its idiosyncratic interactions with other processes, whether it is variability in feedstocks, interactive variability in various product stages, getting the bugs worked out of a newly installed machine, buggy intersystem comms, structural vibration of the factory structure itself, process timing to deal with those vibration issues, etc etc etc etc.
The overall system complexity of even a modest modern factory is orders of magnitude above say, 1940s style manufacturing which is what most people visualise when they think of a factory.
The problem isn't knowledge, it's skill and understanding. Plenty of people spend three years doing a CS degree, read a stack of textbooks, learn how to recite all the right buzzwords and still come out unable to write FizzBuzz.
Manufacturing is really hard. Getting good at it requires a lot of hands-on experience. China (and Japan before them) didn't just Xerox a bunch of American knowledge and become world-class manufacturing economies overnight; it took decades of investment and hard work to build up a skills base. If America wants to reverse the decline of their manufacturing sector, it'll take an equally determined effort.
I've been computering for 20 odd years, now an SRE and I have no idea wtf a FizzBuzz is. Is that one of those bullshit interview questions given at places that would be horrible to work for?
I'm referring to tacit knowledge - the nuances of a subject that are difficult or impossible to codify, express or transmit.
As a machinist, I rely a great deal on intuition. I can hear a bad cut across the room. I couldn't tell you exactly what it is that I'm listening for, but I can tell just by sound that a cutting insert is worn out or that the feeds and speeds aren't quite right. When I look at a drawing to plan out a sequence of cutting operations, I'm balancing dozens of parameters and thousands of subtle factors to achieve a suitable compromise between material removal rate, process stability, tool wear, energy consumption, precision and complexity. I can teach you all of the facts that I'm weighing up, but I can't fully explain all of the heuristics and instincts that guide that process of optimisation.
Essentially all production machining is done with automated CNC machines, but most apprentices still start out learning on manually-operated machines. There are things you learn by standing at a machine and turning the handwheels that nobody knows how to teach.
Try reading about a subject. Then learn from someone who has worked with the subject for 10-20 years. Experience matters a lot for deep knowledge. That's an important kind of knowledge.
I think this is unfair to the definition of knowledge because what you and the parent post are saying ironically forces it into a cube-like box. Knowledge usually refers to an all-encompassing definition:
> understanding of or information about a subject that you get by experience or study, either known by one person or by people generally
Personally, it's pretty rare I do something and it's the same each time, so I can draw on skill and expertise ( a form of knowledge) to help me out, but generally there is some inventiveness required for a given situation.
For example, as a builder, you'd quickly understand two pieces of wood are the same, that's something which requires skills to work around, not just knowledge. Maybe it's better to say applied knowledge?
Recently I've moved areas, and the type of cedar I get here is a little bit different to the type of cedar I get out west. It feels different to work with, and it's a bit of an art not to damage it. My previous knowledge didn't really prepare me for this.
I think that studying never gives deep knowledge if it doesn't involve actually doing it, i.e practice. I think that can get us closer to where the gap is here: just reading something is not enough to have all the knowledge?
“Oh no, all the training materials for this technique/tool are in Chinese and are spread out across a variety of media. If only we had a tool that could slurp up all this training data easily and teach it to me not only in my own language, but also via my favorite method of learning”.
How well does ChatGPT operate a lathe? Construct a mold that produces a plastic cast not prone to defects? Tweak a process that suddenly started to produce too much defective output to avoid defects?
Possibly the current approaches to AI can be used in these areas. But I'm afraid we're very much not there yet.
Wait, I thought the knowledge had been permanently destroyed? Forever lost, with no hope of ever figuring out whatever it was? Simply rediscovering what was previously known seems reasonably achievable!
You aren't gaining experience every second of those 20 years. There is definitely a large condensation factor to be had here and knowledge can be transferred in written word. What are we saying here? The only method of communication has to be done via hip thrusts and eye brow waggles?
Why can't you teach a language to a native proficiency in a year?
There's quite a lot to know, and the speed of learning is limited. Answers to advanced questions which you are ready to provide must be met by the actual questions from the student, which must first form in their head as a result of processing the previous servings of knowledge.
The corpus of a language is a lot larger and more complex than 20 years of experience in manufacturing especially when a lot of the techniques become dated as new ways of doing things are discovered.
Also, we teach thousands of years of experience in mathematics within the scope of 10-20 years.
The problem isn't that you can't teach 20 years of experience in a year - you can. The problem is that this knowledge isn't stored anywhere that's easily accessible and that makes propagation next to impossible.
Aside the hyperbole, yeah, it's now decades of 're-learning' ahead again, that's permanently destroyed for a generation or two (considering the existing decades of loss) who it won't be there for.
Sure the skills can be taught to people, but who wants to do it for slave wages? If the CEO's salary were cut in half, and the other half distributed among the employees, people would be clamoring to learn these skills. The CEO would still be doing extremely well and workers would be getting paid a real living wage. But nobody wants to do most of the jobs it takes to bring manufacturing back if the pay isn't there.
That's called cherry picking. Most of Apple's employees aren't slaving away in factories, and they already get paid well. Apple also outsources the really shitty manufacturing work to people making slave wages in other countries where they don't even have a choice not to work.
If you can cherry pick, then I can too. Rivian's CEO made $422,140,679 in 2021, and they have 14,122 employees, so half that salary divided by number of employees comes out to $14,946 per employee. Not a bad bump in pay especially if you're in a factory putting together car parts.
The CEO of "Lucid Group, Inc." made $565,591,512 in 2021 and they had 7,200 employees, so the figure there is $39,277 per employee. Trust me, Peter Rawlinson will do just fine making only $282,795,756 per year.
The CEO of "Bright Health Group, Inc." makes $180,813,849 per year and they employ 1500 people - split in half and distributed to the employees they would get a pay bump of $60,271 per year.
So yeah. You can cherry-pick all you want, but the fact is that CEO pay is too damned high, and it's no wonder people don't want to go slave away in factories making a few dollars while the CEOs can afford 3 mega yachts and 12 vacation homes.
If you dig a little deeper into the Rivian and Lucid cases, you’ll see there’s no cash to spread around: Those are all long-term, incentive-based packages in currently illiquid equity. There’s a non-trivial chance their net value will be much closer to $0 than those headline numbers.
Re: Bright Health Group, similarly a one-time incentive grant which will likely end up around $0 given the firm’s struggles.
I’m not claiming all CEO pay is wise, of course. But “take 50% of CEO pay and redistribute it to the workers” wouldn’t move any needles.
Satya Nadella can surely afford a few nice yachts at this point, but in aggregate Microsoft handed out $7.5 billion(!!) in stock to its employees last year. His $55M was a drop in the bucket, and given what he’s done for those employees’ stock over the past decade I’d think they’d consider pay like that a bargain at twice the price.
There's stuff like weapons where the knowhow is truly gone. So the DoD has to reverse engineer the remaining artifacts and attempt to recreate the entire stack.
During WWI, the French deployed a really good field gun, Canon de 75 modèle 1897. Late at war, the US adopted this design as well and started manufacturing those guns at home.
Nevertheless, even with all the blueprints at their disposal, early American-manufactured 75s were inferior to their French counterparts. It took a personal visit of the senior French engineers in the US plants to correct various subtle flaws in the manufacturing process.
Documentation counts. The problem is a lot of insider and seemingly-common knowledge is never written down and is usually spread through word of mouth. Any sufficiently lengthy disruption means that knowledge is lost.
Some knowledge is hard to write down. Imagine trying to teach yourself karate from books only. It might be similar with some mechanical or artistic skills that are best taught in person.
Arguably, nowadays, with cheap recording devices everywhere, it is easier than before to produce comprehensive documentation even for such activities that are hard to write down.
Globalization as we have experienced it in the recent decades is a giant, short-termist arbitrage of labor and environmental conditions across different countries.
It benefited colluding elites that struck the political agreements to make it happen. It also helped expand a more consumerist society by making a wider range of products accessible to the masses.
But it was never a blueprint for sustainable, long term, globalization (which is in principle a good thing). The colluding elites turned on each other and became geopolitical adversaries (It turns out its not such a great idea to outsource both brain and muscle function to the tiger chasing you)
The financially overextended consumers realized that ever increasing consumption is neither economically viable nor does it ensure a balanced and fulfilled life. And underneath it all a struggling biosphere is sending the increasingly not-so-subtle message that we are nearing a precipice.
Its not clear what will be the successor "scheme". Malgovernance is the norm. Ideally you'd want to take the lessons of this failed large scale social engineering experiment on board. Ensure that economies are built stably, from the bottom up, with "middle class" being the bulk of the wealth distribution, a full range of capacities, adapted to the local environment etc.
Its not clear though that there is anybody that feels the need to learn.
The economic benefit was given to them in an opportunistic and exploitative way: for as long as they are cheap and not too demanding, happy to live and work in degraded conditions etc.
Probably less bad than being condemned in medieval living conditions but not an excuse for not thinking about genuinely better ways. The shape of humam economy (eg whether unequal, stratified, slave labor based or more or less egalitarian) is an entirely cultural choice.
Copenhagen theory of moral entanglement strikes again. A company that never gives workers from third world any jobs will never be blamed for their conditions, but another company that offers them salaries twice as high as they had before will be crucified for not offering the same rates as in the first world.
Honestly, your stance is not only irrational, but even immoral.
I don’t agree.
If a company creates jobs in a third world country which would have been otherwise created in their “own” [1] country if not for cost reasons is morally and ethically in a grey area.
On the other hand, said workers in the third world country that has seen their conditions and prosperity get better will only want their conditions to get even better. This is what happened in the first world. A company preventing that is immoral.
1: own in the sense the place that contributed (schools, taxes, stable political system) to their growth to a point that they have wealth and expertise to invest in other countries.
Pressumably your superior moral compass is intensily relaxed about third world sweatshops, lethal mines and systemic pollution given that the "rate" is 2x their prior earning potential.
Widespread abuse and exploitation of people by people would not possible if the beneficiaries were not extremely skillful to rationalize their self-serving ideologies.
Having worked in the custom manufacturing machinery business a long time I would guess that they ironically cheaped out but purchasing all their equipment overseas.
There are extremely knowledgeable machine builders in the USA and Canada (think rust belt) that have been building equipment like this since the 1950s (think automotive sway bars, coil springs, etc), but over the last decade you see a lot companies trying to purchase their equipment from former eastern block countries or China to save money.
Nothing against Belarus, but I guarantee there are USA machine builders that could have got this up and running (for more money of course).
There's some parallel between steel tools and bike frames with regards to things moving to Taiwan. Both things like wrenches/ratchets/sockets and steel bike frames moved largely to Taiwan 20+ years ago.
Guess what? Taiwan got really good at making both. So in the tool community, you have lots of comparisons drawn between the US and Taiwan and China, with the narrative that as far as Asian manufactured tools, the "good stuff" comes out of Taiwan, and the not-usually-as-good out of China.
There's a similar narrative on bike frames. The interesting thing is that Taiwan didn't just get good at steel bike frames, but on the aluminum and carbon fiber successors as well.
I would frankly rather Craftsman be a sustainable brand manufactured out of Taiwan with a warranty and continuity of product to back it, but unfortunately the collapse of Sears and the subsequent trading of the Craftsman label has made it more of a liability.
This started in the 60s, when manufacturing started moving to Japan. "Made in Japan" was the mark of garbage (I inherited some of those old Japanese-made tools from my Dad. I only keep them for nostalgia reasons.)
Then in the 80s Japan got very good at manufacturing. And they got expensive as a result. So cheap manufacturing moved to Taiwan, and "Made in Taiwan" became the mark of garbage.
Now Taiwan has become a very good manufacturer, but it's expensive, so cheap manufacturing moved to China.
And now high-end Japanese brands outsource their manufacturing to...China.
In the 1870s, Britain found cheap, low-quality German imports were being mislabelled as British. "Made in Germany" also started as a mark of low quality.
What’s amazing is the breaking strength and precision of old Made in America Craftsman wrenches versus the new overseas ones. Plenty of test videos on YouTube. I’m not giving up my mia set anytime soon.
Nice plug in the article, too. kinda "the few 'Made in USA' Craftsman(TM) socket sets on store shelves now are sure to be collector's items, go snap one up before the sell out! We did!"
Is that "$90 million factory" number correct? Seems rather low, I'd guess that just the robots alone to run an automated factory of any real scale would cost an order of magnitude more than that.
I feel like title is better phrased as "Shareholder value driven governance meant America’s largest tool company divested itself of the manufacturing competence to make wrenches in America".
The reasons in the story are mostly symptoms of financialization -- the people making the major decisions were only looking at financial metrics, not operational metrics. The operational failures were driven by financial constraints. In turn the financial metrics weren't driven by actual constraints (capital available) but by gameable financial goals like ROI.
If the business had goals of being sustainable and reasonably profitable, and was run with strong operational guidance, it could have been successful.
It is surprising that there are those that feel manufacturing is just a factory which is just a building, when it is obviously so much more: knowledge, experience, know-how, talent, equipment, tooling, processes, etc.
Manufacturing is a lost art and many other such areas are quickly becoming lost art as the people who know how to do things get older and retire. I find not many young people, and I'm not even that old, want to actually learn from older workers and would rather try and re-invent the wheel every time.
As an investor in robotics, I found this interesting:
> Nick Pinchuk, CEO of Snap-on, another premium brand, said that in 2010 the company’s U.S. factories had a roughly 100-to-1 ratio of workers to robots. Today it’s 8 to 1, but the gradual transition helped the company identify the optimal roles for humans and machines, he said.
Someone buying machine tools from Belarus and hoping it will work is just lol. Belarusians themselves are buying second- and third-hand German or Austrian equipment to make their stuff.
> The main branches of industry produce tractors and trucks, earth movers for use in construction and mining, [metal-cutting machine tools], agricultural equipment, motorcycles, chemicals, fertilizer, textiles, and consumer goods.
I'm curious about how well the stuff they bought works in Belarus. I remember reading a story a while ago how manufacturing was surprisingly high tech therebut can't find it now.
An interesting thing about Belarus is they largely kept a command and control style economy (while Russia and Ukraine were hollowed out by vultures and lost a good bit of industrial knowledge and capability, in comparison). I’m not supporting their system by any means, but Belarus is known for producing high quality products (tractors, food, etc).
This just shows how much China is saving American consumers!
Back when we were forced to buy Made in America tools, manufactures were able to get away with charging us as much as they wanted, and they were very greedy!
Thanks to China, inflation adjusted tool prices have dropped by at least 75%.
And Chinese quality is good enough for the Snap-On name!
It’s a long article lamenting that onshore manufacturing doesn’t work. But, maybe it’s just they weren’t good at it? Maybe their leadership was poor? Perhaps their technical automation solutions were poor? I refuse to believe that the only way to make things is on effectively slave labour.
It is not the only way, it is the most cost-effective way. Our system is designed to evolve for cost, which inevitably means harm to workers, by rewarding slavish work in cheap places to live and discouraging American work. We absolutely can do loads of stuff onshore with some investment, but it clashes with our system at a deeply fundamental level. If there is one singlular solitary sentiment I agree with hard-conservatives on, it's "America first" (or really just the idea of "<our society> first" in general). Scrubbed of the oft-hinted disdain for others, of course.
>We absolutely can do loads of stuff onshore with some investment
"Some" investment is a gross understatement.
Manufacturing is highly skilled work. This project failed because they simply did not have enough people involved who understood the forging process; they tried to build an automated system to perform a process that they did not fully understand. Making metal into shapes involves a near-infinite array of subtleties, nuances and gotchas; automating that work requires a deep understanding of all those edge cases. HN readers should be able to draw clear parallels with the failure modes of large software projects.
The fundamental bottleneck in any effort to reshore manufacturing is the supply of skilled labor. Skilled American manufacturing workers are retiring faster than they are entering the workplace. We are plugging the gap with automation, but that only gets you so far, as this example illustrates. Reversing that decline will take a generation or two, because there's a chicken-and-egg problem. Good manufacturing workers need years of on-the-job experience, but the number of manufacturing jobs is limited by the lack of skilled workers to fill the vacancies that already exist.
"America first" is a jingoistic slogan that devalues the manufacturing workforce. China did an incredible job of creating a world-class manufacturing economy. Cheap labor was an important stepping stone towards that, but it's no longer the decisive factor. If you don't respect your rivals, you can't understand how to compete. American manufacturing has a network effects problem and there's no quick or easy solution to that.
It’s also about driving everything to the bottom. Why does society need a cheap throwaway tool? What if only high quality, well made tools were available that truly reflected their production cost - both materially, environmentally and in terms of complete labour cost (as in, well paid employees with adequate 401k, holidays, etc). Not everyone needs a cheap tool, what if the tool reflected the true cost and it was very expensive and only a few have them? What happens? You borrow one. You save up for one. You pay a professional who has all the right tools.
I’m pretty sure this is (put very simply), how it always worked until globalization was sold as a good idea. It’s funny how democracy attempted to trickle down into materialism - as in we think it’s our god damn right to own whatever we want at the lowest possible cost regardless of its effects.
I think there's a weird situation here. People don't actually want 'cheap' things made in America (because that's what China et al do), but then complain it's too expensive to make locally.
This is very difficult to solve: allow cheap locally made products while still allowing pride in the 'locally made' label...
I suspect that it has more to do with the desire to have tools. No one in the year 1900 would have said they did not want tools. They were essential, and even if you had no particular need for a tool yourself, it was something to loan for favor trading. If someone would've have given them high quality tools, it'd be like gifting you or me a spaceship.
Today? Who wants a tool, they live in places where they can't even keep more than the tiniest assortment of tools, and they use them infrequently enough for them to be more of a burden than an asset.
If such people do not want tools, they sure as hell don't want expensive, high quality tools. Those are like the cheap ones, but they cost more and you cry more when you lose them moving to the next apartment. And if no one wants high quality tools...
Well, no one's going to bother to sell them.
If I'm honest, it's a little bit of what you say and the two effects play off on each other as it spirals down into the void.
> Today? Who wants a tool, they live in places where they can't even keep more than the tiniest assortment of tools, and they use them infrequently enough for them to be more of a burden than an asset.
In this case, tool lending libraries are a great solution. You can see if there is one near you at:
Globalism wasn't "sold" as a good idea. Shareholders of companies that make tools just realized they profit more by increasing the difference between cost of production and final sale price.
Of course it was sold - by the means you mentioned, but also, those profits were then quickly deployed into decades long marketing strategies - which has led to a world addicted to low quality, cheap goods - an addiction we cannot be weaned off of. So much so, as the article laments, we can't even make a wrench.
My memory is everyone just loved buying cheaper things like flatscreens. This “selling” business is made up hindsight and I hear it a lot. “Do you think globalism is a good idea”. No idea but weren’t you just at Black Friday buying $300 TVs, wear fast fashion, and buy cheap tools?
They don't exactly go around telling us that it's cementing centralisation of large corporations, leveraging slave/cheap labour as much as possible until caught while reducing local opportunities and knowledge, environmental impact of mass packaging and supply chains, bringing wonderful tax avoidance opportunities and flouting quality controls and regulations.
But of course, blame the consumer, because it was sold with full warnings but they didn't listen ..
Because, I'm a consumer, who needs a screwdriver maybe every 3 years. I don't care if it's lower quality because i never do more than tighten the hinges on my door frame.
Instead of spending $20 on a top of the line screwdriver, I can spend $3 and it still does everything I need it to.
If you had to buy the top quality $20 screwdriver, maybe it'd eventually be passed on to one of our children, or go to someone else. I know that sounds kind of silly when we're talking about screwdrivers, but hopefully it'd still mean a world that needs to manufacture a few less items.
If the only screwdrivers were $20, a lot of people would use butter knifes to screw in a lot more things. They're not good screwdrivers, but they're not $20 either.
What would happen is screwdrivers would rarely break, all the necessary screwdrivers would be made, we'd get cheap screwdrivers secondhand that had been straightened or re-shaped. The market would shrink considerably and the companies making screwdrivers would be at risk of closing. Repair shops would increase, resource usage would decrease, there'd be far less need of recycling.
Capitalism is completely incompatible with economy and environmentalism.
There is a significant second-hand market for good quality tools that were built to last. But you have to be reasonably informed in the first place as a consumer to know what's good and what's bad.
The system optimizes for cost because most customers shop for cost.
When you are working you want wages as high as possible. When you are shopping you implicitly want others wages as low as possible.
Almost everything in economics is a paradox like that because it’s a machine made of feedback loops and control systems. A standard control system has something pushing one way and something else pushing the other way.
> When you are shopping you implicitly want others wages as low as possible.
Maybe I'm splitting hairs here, but this isn't true stated like this. I'm surely not representative of most shoppers, but I don't want wages lower, I want the actual workers to get the largest cut of what I spend. Higher ups are salaried and have a guaranteed stable income which is not anything like an hourly wage. Lowering prices by simply cutting bonuses to people who already have a stable income is not at all the same as wanting hourly employees to take pay cuts to make your junk cheaper.
Yet people complain loudly about the one case where we can directly affect the worker's pay who are doing the actual work - tipping culture is widely derided as some sort of societal ill.
No, some of us complain bitterly about tipping culture because the waitstaff should be paid a living wage without having to be tipped. And some of us complain even more bitterly because the pittance they are paid doesn't keep up with the cost of living and so the amount of the tip as a percentage of the bill has to keep going up.
To be clear: I tip well when I eat out. My irritation at the system is not something I take out on the people serving my food.
Valid point but usually in manufacturing labor and materials are the largest costs. Management can be in some cases less than 10% for a large operation, though it depends on scale and how efficient it is.
C suite people are often overpaid but this is still usually a small cost center for a really big company, and most consumer products are made by large companies. Also those inflated compensation packages often include a bunch of stock and other non-cash compensation.
Sure. I guess also the worry in the hyper capitalist world we now live in, is that our very lives are optimized to shop. Every minute of life has become financialized. We are these hunks of meat walking around trying to optimize everything. Shame.
I’ll blame private equity. Made in U.S.A. brand gets bought by PE that uses a pile of debt. Then they just dump all that debt on the company, and no shit, “we can’t afford to make things in the USA anymore”, because we loaded up the brand with 80% of its worth in debt, with no material gain for the actual manufacture of goods, and now we gotta service the debt!!
Raising the price of imported goods via tariffs is designed to make domestic products comparatively price-competitive. Once you've driven all of your manufacturing offshore, tariffs won't work. While there are a few toolmakers left in the US, there are, for example, no cellphone makers, etc.
Use of protective tariffs to shelter domestic production whilst developing that production capacity is in fact A Thing, and is actually a principle component of what is known as the American School of economics, which strongly influenced US economic policy from the 1790s through the 1970s, and had as a chief proponent Friedrich List (1789--1846).
A modern proponent is Ha-Joon Chang, particularly in his books Kicking Away the Ladder and Bad Samaterians.
No, it doesn't matter that there's no domestic manufacturing of X today. If you put a sufficiently high tariff on X you'll get it made locally sooner than later.
Tarrifs are crude but very effective centrally planned price signals.
Perhaps this isn't just a case of labor costs and failure of automation but also a story of business venture that simply failed due to a once-in-a-century pandemic and our government's poor handling of it (by two administrations):
"Executives said at Stanley’s May 2019 investor day that the factory would be in production in 18 months. Former employees said that timetable, thrown off by the pandemic, meant the system wasn’t properly tested before being brought up to scale. "
Consequently:
"By then, Stanley had already announced it was divesting its security business, its oil-and-gas unit and a door-making division in a bid to become a more focused company. An earnings call in July 2022 revealed that the core tool business had suffered a sudden drop in demand after the boom times of the pandemic."
This idea that "the USA can't manufacture anything any more" is bullshit. Just looks at all the stuff we DO manufacture like Boeing aircraft, the latest microprocessors, and most advanced spacecraft.
Also you don't have to either, you really only have to make airplanes, ships, weapons and missiles, everything else is kind of unnecessary if you have those. As long as you have the bigger stick nothing else really matters, of course you'll be hated by everyone else but that's not really a problem. You just call that stick "liberalism" and call it a day.
The response is always: "Oh, well, we're not making enough profit to justify staying open." Are you serious? It's greed manifest at sociopathic levels.
When employees quit to take a higher paying job elsewhere, do you feel the same way? They weren’t making enough to “justify staying open” at their old job, so they changed and we celebrate them for their action (as we should, IMO).
When we use a coupon or shop on Black Friday, we’re being smart, frugal purchasers. When companies do the equivalent, what are they doing?
Most companies frown on employees working multiple full time jobs, so yeah, gotta quit the existing job to take a new one. Companies can operate multiple lines of business.
Unless they’re hourly. Then sure, go work another shift elsewhere as long as you can keep your eyes open here. Wooooah, FTE and want to tend bar on the weekend? Forget it.
We don't have to have the same rules for people as for companies. There's absolutely nothing preventing us from saying "If person does X, it's fine. If company does X, it's bad."
For regular commodities economics obviously matter, it makes sense to produce goods where it is done most efficiently, both for the buyer as well as for the producer. A wrench isn't a cutting edge semiconductor, if you're going to ignore price signals what's next, state level wrench patriotism because those bastards in Ohio can't get away with stealing our wrench industry in Tennessee? Business should focus on what they're profitable at, that's just indicates proper allocation of resources.
As the article says, premium wrenches are already made in America. Consumers pay for comparatively-expensive American labour in comparatively-expensive premium products.
The article is about an attempt to onshore the wrenches for a low-price tools brand. Those wrenches are currently made in a labour-intensive process by low-cost Chinese labour. If they use USA labour they'll have to charge premium tool prices and consumers won't go for it. So they tried to automate. Yes, reducing the need for American labour, but not because they wanted to charge premium prices for the result.
Interestingly, even the machines required to bring manufacturing back to America aren't made in America.
Excuse me, but what? The Craftsman brand historically was a consumer premium brand, priced midway between tradesmen premium brands like Snap-On and consumer "hardware store cheap tools" -- Craftsman was never a low-price brand. Craftsman used to stand for quality, with a lifetime no-questions-asked guarantee wherein, if the tool fails for any reason, it will be replaced. Period. No questions asked, no receipt required. Quality. And men proudly used their father's or grandfather's tools.
I remember well when Craftsman moved hand tool manufacturing from USA to China. Clearly cost of production was lower, but prices didn't change. The company could pocket the difference... and that's just how it went, at least until the consumer wised up and realized what was happening : a quiet substitution of Chinese-made cheap products but keeping yesterday's premium price. Cheap tool at top-dollar price. Tradesmen are not fools -- they know when their tools are not holding up, and they're being cheated. So the consumer rightly felt cheated and abandoned the brand.
Sears broke the contract, and quickly lost the trust. In just a few years, they destroyed one of the most trusted brands which took 100 years to build. The brand was sold off, and now it's just another meaningless string of letters. Today, Sears is dead and gone, for many reasons just like this. Good riddance.
> Sears broke the contract, and quickly lost the trust. In just a few years, they destroyed one of the most trusted brands which took 100 years to build. The brand was sold off, and now it's just another meaningless string of letters. Today, Sears is dead and gone, for many reasons just like this. Good riddance.
What actually happened: Sears got rolled up with KMart, eventually went out of business. Sears house brands like Craftsman and Kenmore (home appliances) were sold off during the fire sale at the end. Ironically, Sears was the Amazon of the early 1900s but became too invested in big mall stores. When the ecommerce boom hit, Sears had just closed down their catalog division.
What really happened is that Eddie Lampert engineered a financial bust out of both Sears and Kmart. Extracted billions and left the carcass of formerly great companies.
It's accurate that Lampert did engineer a bust, but it happened after Sears had missed the ecommerce boat. I don't think Lampert could have done the deal if Sears hand adopted the internet. The Lampert purchase happened in 2005. Sears shuttered the catalog business in 1993, and Amazon launched in 1994. Amazon started expanding into non-book product in 1998, and it was clear to the Sears universe that they had completely and utterly messed up.
> Lampert is a self-proclaimed supporter of free market economics and is a fan of libertarian writer Ayn Rand.
Big surprise there.
From another article:
> As Sears blew through its dwindling cash reserves, Lampert’s hedge fund made loans to the company money that were backed by the company’s assets, including real estate balances on Sears credit cards. That made him Sears’ largest creditor: Sears owes him at least $1.3 billion.
>Craftsman used to stand for quality, with a lifetime no-questions-asked guarantee wherein, if the tool fails for any reason, it will be replaced. Period. No questions asked, no receipt required. Quality. And men proudly used their father's or grandfather's tools.
This means people bring in 25, or 50 year old worn down tools, and Craftsman replaces them for free. While having to pay modern material and labor costs to replace a tool that was bought 25-50 years before. If that happens too much, it becomes a huge liability on the company. Hopefully the person walking in to replace a damaged or worn hammer or screwdriver decides to buy a set of wrenches while standing there, making it an upsell for Craftsman, but likely it didn't happen enough to keep them viable.
Harbor Freight offers the same warranty now on their hand tools, and Home Depot on Husky's (Home Depot even did a promotion around the time Sears ended their warranty where they'd replace a craftsman tool with a husky for free).
The cost of the replacement is marketing at some point; replacing a obviously abused tool may be a technical loss but you've a customer for life; unless you betray them as Craftsman did (which is why people are still so heated about it twenty years later).
But no one looking to seriously buy tools goes to Harbor Freight, expecting to pass that tool to their child or grandchildren. They go there to buy the crappy chinesium grade tool that gets a job done. If they find that they need the tool often enough, then they buy the heirloom grade one.
I'm impressed that the Craftsman brand, without any manufacturing capability since it was all outsourced, and its reputation falling due to lower quality tools and its association with dying Sears, still sold for nearly a billion dollars.
Even now it's probably one of the more recognizable brand names among "the general public" even if tradesmen and those in the know wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole.
You can troll bankruptcies to see what the brand goes for sometimes, I know someone bought the ToysRus brand and stuck them inside Macy's for some reason.
I’m not really sure how that’s possible - when I’ve gotten quotes for short run highly automated manufacturing (the stuff the US should be comparatively good at!), the overseas numbers are usually about half those of the US on a per part basis. IIRC can try this for yourself on Xometry by changing the manufacturing location.
But there’s also more than just labor cost. In my experience: when we ask a Chinese manufacturer about something they don’t have the capability to do, they’ll come back with subcontracting options from the factory down the road who can do it. There’s so much manufacturing capability concentrated in a small number of places that every process option is on the table. But in North America, it’s a very different story. Everything is so spread out so your options are dramatically more limited unless you want to be shipping parts across the country.
I’m not saying NA-based manufacturing is bad: the org I work for still does most stuff here for agility, communication, and security reasons. But it’s not cheap.
> There’s so much manufacturing capability concentrated in a small number of places that every process option is on the table
Which is why the auto industry grew up in the Great Lakes in general and southeastern Michigan in particular: there were so many different machine shops that you could find someone to make almost any imaginable part and just order the quantity needed without having to worry about making something like the River Rouge plant that took in raw materials and spat out cars.
Try it for short run PCB or PCBA and you’ll see the difference is 3-20x rather than merely 2x. (And the one that’s on the low end of the scale isn’t as flexible as the Chinese suppliers; most are in the 8-20x range.)
The ability for contract manufacturers to simply source things from neighboring companies is a very real thing - and usually the quality is pretty good. Somehow, working between companies is a quick and fast thing, where here making a new business relationship is seemingly mired in problems.
But is it completely false? Or does that 4% statistic also suffer from an over generalization based on very broad averages that can have extreme fluctuations when individual, specific cases are considered?
That's not interesting, it is the utterly predictable result of not making anything. Of course the only ones getting better at it and making machines for it are those doing the manufacturing.
So then clickbait title should be modified to say "low-price wrench"?
Makes sense that fairly paid labor is going to result in more expensive products that the end consumer will likely pass over if it's lacking in quality. And many consumers don't shop with these issues in mind. If they're on a tight budget and just need to fix something, lowest price may be their only priority. Tough problem to address from all angles.
Because the country has lower standards of living and a government that busts independent unions while deliberately manipulating their currency to make sure workers do not end up with too much buying power.
That is a bit circular. The economy isn't like weather where some places just have less rain. China's cost of living is 40-70% lower because the people doing the work are willing to charge less.
In some cases, because we make it illegal for Americans to act on it even they were willing/interested. That’s not the majority of the story, but it’s part of it.
That's because businesses compete with each other. So if Corporation A suddenly decides to pay workers a "proper wage", and raises the product prices accordingly, Corporation B will just take their share.
That's where the regulators are supposed to step in by setting the rules that both Corporation A and Corporation B are forced to follow, if they want to access the market.
Except, they won't because the elites are perfectly fine with the status quo, and the regular people seem to care more about pronouns and plastic straws, than being able to afford a decent lifestyle.
I have no problem with and want regulators to regulate on worker safety, plant emissions, and truth/fairness in advertising.
I don’t want regulators to force rules on lifetime warranty, sales methods, tolerances and material specifications and the like. The latter is where the tool truck brands are often winning for demanding users of tools.
Simply incorrect. The market doesn't want that, you don't want. You, and most others, want a $99 drill. A $99 drill doesn't support your fantasy wages.
You can get a Ryobi HP+ Brushless drill for $50. It's a fantastic unit for all but the heaviest users.
You can't tell me those couldn't be made in the USA at a premium of $49 per unit. You could literally pay $50/hr, produce only one unit per hour, and still come out even.
The outsourcing arguments are lazy and outdated. Companies screwed up outsourcing it all, and the US is unable to regain its foothold. Labor costs are negligible here, even if US were twice the price.
You need to figure why you support onshoring. The elites support it because they can see the writing on the wall for what might happen in a future conflict, not out of the goodness of their hearts or for some fantasy about labor economics. The "made in America" nonsense is bullshit sold to unions and rural areas decimated by outsourcing for the sake of votes. The consent is manufactured by dangling a carrot that will never materialize. The jobs are going to Mexico, they are not coming back. The feds want corporations to onshore for purely strategic reasons, and all the subsidies are to make automation possible to bring the costs down. The workers were never the priority.
You're going to be hard-pressed to convince somebody that they should go with Snap-on, Matco, Mac, Stahlwille, Hazet, KTC, Ko-ken, or any other company that is making superior tools by paying their workers better wages when doing so means they'll be paying multiple tens of thousands by the time it's all said and done.
The easy (and wrong) answer to why this is happening is that capitalism ruins everything. The actual answer is that most people don't need or want tools and will not pay the premium for good new tools.
You sell the high end brands by selling "this tool will not fail you" - and you prove that by manufacturing it in a high-cost area (as we're seeing, you can't make low-cost tools in high-cost areas) among other things.
China can make exceptionally high-quality tools, you just have to design it well and pay for it.
Thing is I don’t need a tool that won’t fail me. I need a wrench once every couple of years and not for anything difficult. I got a cheap set from Amazon. I know it’s low quality and not the most durable, but it’s sufficient for my use case. Even if I were to replace the set twice it’s still cheaper.
The nth time someone's like "corporations dude", "capitalism dude", "they just want to see butts in seats dude". Christ, it's like some kind of pothead lamentation circle.
That’s not the real issue. You are confusing a side effect with a root cause. The root is capitalism. Btw ,for the record, I am not against capitalism. I am very much for it. It’s just that this is the side effect of capitalism. A capitalistic environment begets competition. Competition begets survival. Survival begets perpetual need to contain costs. People for most business are a big part of its cost structure. Unless you are a monopoly (think google etc) there is little incentive to give your employees a fair wage. Labor market supply and demand play a part in this too but all things equal to survive in competition keeping cost as low as possible goes a very very long way.
I think just like everything evolves capitalism needs to evolve too. “We need capitalism 2.0”Profit cannot be the sole focus. We need to shift to capitalism with a heavy bent on sustainability. Sustainable profits, sustainable for the community it serves in etc. we live in an evolved society where we curb our raw instincts for the general good. There used to be a time when all humans simply acted on their r as emotion and instincts and from that we evolved on. Same need to happen with how we organize and structure our economies and businesses.
I don't think the actual cause is capitalism. I think that there is a business culture that seeks maximum profit at any cost. Seeking maximum profit is not actually required to run a business, you can do so with a lower profit and not go broke.
