Allan Miller posted:palallin posted:*sigh* Yes, of course the Big Corporations' greed is completely responsible for all our woes. How silly of me to suggest that economic reality has anything to do with it.
Other companies have shown that it is possible to return/retain domestic production with reasonable prices--heck, Lionel is doing some of that themselves.
You can be quite sure that, aside from production of select items such as rolling stock where the tooling is already here (some Lionel product, for example), you will NOT see the manufacturing of major items such as motive power return to the U.S. There may be alternative countries that can handle these things to avoid sticking with China, but I seriously doubt that any of the toy and model train manufacturers, regardless of scale, will return full production to the U.S. As desireable as that might be, it just does not make a whole lot of economic sense these days, especially since, as I understand it, toy train makers today with production in China do not even have full control/ownership over their own tooling.
When the manufacturers moved production to China in the late 1990s, I said to myself, “They’re making a deal here from which there is no return.” Once you go to China, China takes ultimate control of what you bring with you.
That’s how they have grown to be what they are; western companies gave them everything they had in order to save big on production costs.
As Pogo said, “We have met the enemy and he is Us.”
