palallin posted:The idea that the manufacturer of a toy train should in any way be some kind of secret pegs my BS meter. So much for pride in the product.
Another casualty of the "superior global economy."
Generally it isn't. For example, Sears branded appliances were made by people like White Westinghouse and Whirlpool and Amana, and it wasn't exactly a big secret. Sometimes a 'brand' manufacturer will do contract work for cheaper brands, but will ask that the cheaper brand not make that known, with the fear that if it was known people would assume the cheaper manufacturer was the same item (and sometimes, that actually is true....). In the beer world G. Heilman, who produced all these cheap beers (basically buy the name of a good beer, like Canadian Labatts, and produce a generic, crappy beer, they produce illustrious brands like Old Milwaukee, and some of the other cheap brands), did contract work for beers like Sam Adams, and it was kept a kind of secret because they were afraid people would assume the beer was being made to Heilman's (crappy) standards (as soon as they could, Sam Adams bought other breweries so they could produce it themselves, contract brewing it did hurt their image).
Other than that, the only time who produces something for someone is a secret is when the production is very unique, where knowing where it was produced would give competitors an advantage, for example if a certain village in some place has a lot of master craftsmen doing fine castings, then knowing a widget was produced there that required a lot of those castings would allow competitors to horn in......but that wouldn't apply to toy train manufacturing, especially not the kind of things Menards is producing, nothing really that unique about producing those, almost any factory set up with the various injection moulding and tools and dies and such can do it. Usually if a factory is that specialized, they would have in their contract with the person hiring them an agreement not to work for competing firms. The fact that the firm that just shut down (the one Atlas and other companies used) wasn't unique says it isn't specialized. If companies don't talk about who they get to manufacture their items, mostly that is because in this world of outsourced production they assume no one really cares, and they also may not to remind people it was outsourced either, a company might say "proudly made by old world craftsmen in Germany", they won't say "Proudly made by outsourced labor in China".
