Watch Making in China

Pastorbottle

We all tend to look down on Chinese made things, but there are both good and bad reasons for this, The Chinese are perfectly capable of doing quality work, but no one is prepared to pay for it, Western retailers and wholesalers look to China for price not quality most of them are happy to charge top price for stuff they only paid a pittance for, in order to maximise profits.
This situation becomes self perpetuating. And spans across all fields of manufacturing.

I can have flow on consequences, Here in Oz retailing has very concentrated ownership, and these retailers refuse to buy any quality as they can buy rubbish that they screwed down hard on price in order to resell the shoddy item at a high price, as with little or no competition we the consumer is left with no alternative.

This is true of the automotive replacement parts sector the are many different branded retail outlets that are controlled by only 2 major companies these 2 majors have rubbish made pattern parts made for them in China under private label brands. And won't stock anything better, so if you made any of this stuff you now have no market. All the small independent parts retailing groups have been bought up by the big 2 in recent years.

My old locally made Ford Falcon Ute's ball joints were worn so I replaced them with what I could get, as OEM ball joints are NLA, I had to use Chinese made private label stuff from the major retail groups, bloody things didn't last 6 months. The OEM ball joints lasted over 20 yrs!
Extremely pissed by this I started to search the world for alternatives that might be of some quality and found some NOS TRW brand ball joints hiding in an independent retailer in New Zealand, I bought several sets, to squirrel away for the future, even with the shipping cost they were cheaper than the rubbish I could get locally. The trouble is that companies like TRW cant get the market access for parts such as these anymore as the retail groups are only interested in maximising their profits through buying market share by buying out their competitors in order abuse their market power. Sadly this seems to be a common problem across all retail sectors, supermarkets, liquor, hardware, sporting goods, camping gear, appliences etc.
The dickhead politicians of both sides refuse to do anything about it, and as such I can only assume they must have a vested interest in ignoring and perpetuating the problem.

The sad thing is we, the consumers, get it in the neck as do the manufacturers that are trying to make reasonable quality products and other manufacturers that are in countries were such rubbish is made also suffer the shared bad reputation.... all so some already rich arseholes can make excessive profits!