[My blog for 7th, about what happened today]
Chinese junk, part IIYesterday, had three different encounters with chinese junk. Of which there are actually two kinds - one is the classic junk ordered by the big corporations and wannabes from the west, who just want to make a buck and calculate that them firing their workforce won't leave them without customers (even as everybody else does the same, so the salaried worker becomes as rare as snake's feet), and move their production to PRC, lowering the cost and quality, estimating the product's lifetime at just about the time when the stupid consumer can be persuaded that it was about time to buy a new one anyway.
The other one is the kind peddled by the Chineses themselves, either through their PRC-sponsored network of family shops (who are mostly under contract with their government), or through local retail. From my observation, the former is mostly the case here. There's almost a Chinatown around the lower end of the main street here, with six or seven of their shops, including a big one which occupies a former net factory.
Yesterday's shopping started with me buying a replacement ratchet for the set I bought for about 15€ a couple of years ago. It has two ratchets and about 30 bits, and the mechanism in the smaller ratchet just broke recently. Which is a first - I had a german set 20 years ago, had a chinese one 10 years ago (while in the US, but it seems to have been better junk then), and they never broke. Now this one was of type 2, judging by the ugly, badly molded, cheap plastic case. So I went to buy a new one, which cost 4,50€. The shopkeeper said it was a good one, while the type I described as broken he said was generally bad.
While we walked to the car, my wife's shoe yawned. A stitch just came off. Ah - more chinese junk. These shoes were just about a year old. She recounted a few other pairs which lasted even less, a month or two - not to mention my flipflops which lasted ten days. So we went buying shoes.
Ended up in two shops where they had serbian made shoes. The other shops we visited had only the fashionable stuff of obviously shoddy (pardon the pun, if this was one) production values - glue where one would expect a stitch, artificial leather, and about 20 brand names painted on their walls, none of them in serbian. Most of them were no-names to me, of the kind that pops up out of nowhere when someone starts peddling them, pretending they were big names, and trying to make you embarrassed that you didn't know about them. I hazard to guess they have just one supplier.
The first local manufacturer's shop didn't have our sizes of the shoes we liked. Went for the other one, and guess what, they had great stuff. The pair I found for myself looked pretty much like the one I wore for eight years while in the US, all leather, solid stitching (later, found on the box that these were HTZ shoes, i.e. protective work shoes - I don't care, they're what I like). My wife bought two pairs, looking great, also all leather. Actually, they make only leather tops; soles are rock solid plastic.
Next I bought an office chair. Had one already, and it didn't last. The wheels were stuck into bolts welded to the 5-point frame, and the frame wasn't thick enough - it was of pressed sheet metal - so at least three unwelded and their swivel axes weren't vertical anymore. It had cost about 45€ and lasted less than two years; now I got one at 100€, the only one in the whole shop with adjustable armrests. And the armrests are hard plastic, not the rounded hardwood as on the old one. I hope this would cure my pinched nerve in the left elbow. After about six such chairs we had in the family over the years (yes, geeks most of us), I'd classify this one as high-end chinese junk. The 5-point frame is thick plastic, of the kind they use in cars; the upholstery is cloth, not artificial leather (which made my bottom wet with sweat even at this time of year).
Which reminds me of some garments I picked from an early edition of a chinese family shop back in the early nineties. Those were high quality - lasted for years, stitches firm, never unraveled, the weave thick and tight, even the zippers never stuck nor came off.
Morale of the story? It's not the Chineses. It's the brand of capitalism that's pushed at a particular time. Sometimes it's pushing quality stuff just to make inroads into a market. Most of the time it's pushing junk, because the optical illusion of low prices makes more profit. And for the 1% of consumers who want quality, there's always the high end junk.
The trouble is in guys like me, who think their tools, shoes and furniture shouldn't be consumables.
On other fronts, I wrote statcounter.prg today, which is to track the visits on sGradlj.com, as per statistics taken from StatCounter's tracker. It will take me seven years (see 20-X-2019.) to finally find out that they have an API that I can use to make invisible automatic calls and get the current month's visits without actually refreshing the webpage and entering the numbers in fox's command window.