I don't want us to get side-tracked off the main issue. First off, I am convinced that China produces high quality work at a very low price. I strongly feel that people throughout the globe should be given the opportunity to improve their lives.
My point, however, is that five years ago we were paying $6 or $7 for good quality Athearn and MDC cars. Americans, who produced these cars, were making a liveable wage. Today, Chinese workers are working long hours and living in squalid conditions, yet we, the consumers, are having to pay three times more for a similar car. Who winds up with all of that profit? Would it hurt these greedy profiteers to pay the workers 25 cents an hour more and make a huge improvement in their quality of life? If they gave the Chinese worker 25 cents an hour more, would they charge us $40 for the car?
-Ed
Ed
The key word is
similar. Until you or I
know what the actual cost differentials are, or are comparing the
same car, we are speculating. And to put it bluntly, speculating about somebody else's greed, although a common enough American past time, is not a very nice thing to do. I could very easily turn it around, and pronounce us the greedy ones for wanting $6 or $7 cars, when they should cost more.
None of the train manufacturers I know of are publicly owned, and consequently they don't have to show us their books. I do know my local pusher (LHS) isn't making a fortune - he couldn't afford to hire me as additional staff (I asked). And none of the owners of model railroad businesses that I do know personally are living the life style of the rich and famous.
Having studied the business case for starting up a new line of steam kit locomotives, I realized I was probably going to lose my shirt and then some. That's even if I could find some investors to pony up a minimum of $500K to start the venture.
The Athearn blue box kits are still made in the U.S. Bowser, Kadee, and MicroTrains still produce in the U.S. Nearly all the craftsman kits and non-plastic structure kits are made in the U.S. or Canada. Locomotives, due to their higher labor content for assembly, have been imported since the 1950s. Rivarosssi, Aristo-Craft, Japanese and Korean brass, AHM, IHC, and Model Power have all been importing locomotives for decades. Kato and Bachmann are not U.S. companies to begin with.
The big change came when Atlas and MRC decided they wanted to be more than track and power pack companies, respectively. They began importing RTR locomotives and cars, first from Europe, and then later from China. MRC eventually dropped out, but Atlas went on to expand themselves big time.
In the meantime, the original founders of Roundhouse and Athearn (and other names like Varney, Penn Line, Mantua) left the business. The folks who bought the old companies realized that they were not going to survive without producing new product to compete with the others. Yes, they often chose to out-source the new product to China. Producing in China is not without risk or extra costs (lots of extra travel and transportation), but it
may have been the cheaper/easier thing to do than find die makers and set up production in the U.S.
If the hobby should move back to assembling kits rather than buying RTR, production in China loses a lot of its advantages.
just my thoughts