Tuesday, December 3, 2019

Opuscula

Online sellers
Keep products’
Origin a secret

AS “BRICK AND MORTAR” STORES disappear I find I am buying more and more products via the WWW.
Most vendors give so-so descriptions of the product, but when it comes to the product’s point of origin — where is is made — the information either is omitted completely or listed as “imported.”

A QUICK CHECK of six Walmart offerings showed zero product points of origin.

Haband simply lists everything as “imported.”

What’s my problem? China.

Never mind the politics and the fact that China “owns” the U.S. due to the notes it holds signed by presidents of both parties.

Never mind that some — many — products are made in sweatshops that would make the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory (below) look good.

NYC Herald front page after Triangle Shirtwaist fire on 3/25/1911 (https://tinyurl.com/p55zqgn)

The problems are that

    * China lacks Quality Control (QC)
    * China has no regard for safety (feeding feces to fish for export to U.S.), using lead paint on children’s toys, not using fire retardant on clothing, and the list goes on.

Other countries make clothing. Guatemala, Honduras, India (albeit in near-China conditions), Korea, and Taiwan to name five. (Made In Korea tag on right)

I have clothes from China.

Had I known the products’ point of origin was China I would not have bought the items.

I have a cell phone made in China. Unfortunately, almost ALL cell phones are made in China. But cell phones have built-in obsolescence and anyone who thinks they will last beyond a couple of software upgrades is foolish.

I had a coffee urn, a West Bend, I bought because I knew West Bend as an American company from “back in the day.”

When it arrived I read “Made in China” on the bottom plate. Within a short period the plastic spigot broke, making the urn useless. (The vendor replaced the entire unit.)

SOME things “Made in China” are worth buying — PROVIDING the company whose name appears on the product, e.g., Apple, HP, has a reputation for quality.

In the long-ago years when Japanese products were as shoddy as Chinese products are today, some vendors did their own Quality Assurance/Quality Control when the products reached America’s shores.

Honeywell was one of these vendors.

I owned an Asahi Pentax H3v 35mm SLR camera imported by Honeywell (right).

The importer did a QA/QC check on the products. I’m not sure about the sampling rate — the number of items inspected out of a shipment — but I know that Honeywell stood behind the product.

My H3v served me well as a reporter and later served a friend and the friend’s son-in-law for many years after. (I replaced the H3v with a Canon F-1 for the F-1’s features.)

Sampling is Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for products made to military specification (mil-spec). At one point I was employed by a company that made valves — 1/4-inch to 16-inch orifices — primarily for the U.S. and other navies.

The company performed sampling on all incoming components. The sampling rate was determined by the component’s criticality and the vendor’s history. Some items got 100% sampling — every item was inspected — others were sampled at 10%.

“Things” still could happen despite QA/QC, but the probability was minimized.

China has a well-deserved reputation for endangering its workforce and the people who buy its products.

The U.S. government demands that all products list their point of origin.

Why, since it won’t remain a secret, do retailers insist on hiding the products’ point of origin until the customer opens the shipping container?

If a brick and mortar store has the product, I can see the product’s point of origin. There will be a label of some sort somewhere on the product. It’s the law.

Yet the vendor — the Walmarts, Habands, and other similar online vendors — insist on hiding the point of origin in their online advertising.

Maybe President Richard Nixon’s opening China to U.S. trade was a bad deal for us after all.



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