Why the hell do we put up with this?

I've been reading here all day, this lazy Sunday and I've seen countless posts about the way things are today compared to what they were years ago. Example, on another thread someone was asking about chrome reverse or smoothie rims and a person replied to say they were satisfied but the chrome wasn't as good as in the 60's or 70's and he suspected that's just the way things were. There are hundreds of posts that are similar. Why do we put up with all this substandard crap that we buy offshore (read China) for just a few bucks less than the good stuff. That is IF you can even get the good stuff anymore because they went out of business from the competition of the cheap china crap!

I don't want to get off on a tangent but isn't part of the reason we all like these classic vehicles is that they were build when America took a little pride in manufacturing quality and dependable products? We are only shooting ourselves in the foot by buying this cheap crap made overseas. I for one have had enough. I've always put forth an effort to buy USA but I've succumbed to the cheap prices now and again and it seems I've regretted buying the cheap crap every time. So I'm going to do something about it, I vow right here and now to do my best to stop purchasing ANYTHING not made in the USA. I know there is some things that just aren't made here anymore but I'm going to do my damnedest to avoid overseas junk. No more Walmart crap, no more searching google for best price, instead I'll search to find out where it's made.

I know my efforts may not amount to even a drop of water in the ocean but at least I'll sleep better at night.

I'll get off my soapbox thanks for listening.

 

Blame the EPA for the shift to overseas production. That is the root of much of the issue.

 

Thank NAFTA for most of it !

 

That and consumers who only care about price. They'll go buy poop in a box from China all day long then wonder why they can't buy anything decent anymore.

 

I'm with ya Bro, been making the effort for some time now !
I'll gladly pay a little more to keep Americans working.
There is very little difference in prices' just the profit for the cheap a$$ company sellin China made shit !

Can I get a "Hell Yea". .???

 

F&^$ing Walmart is why!!!!

Ive had problems with some repop parts before and call the company and tell them...
"Confusious say, Man who rides 1955 rickshaw to work know not of a 1955 thunderbird"... Add your year and car of course...

I agree quality made repro parts are nearly impossible to find now cause everything is made in china and taiwan be 11 year old virgins...

 

WELLL..... some are even led to believe those Oriental 11 year olds are virgins.

 

Check out Madeintheusa.com Lists items made in the usa.

 

I am with you, and you should try and buy as close to home as you can. Make local habit!

 

That is a big part of it. Also, there are many elitist type people in the US that WANT our country to be DE-industrialised. After all....If there aren't any US steelmills, auto plants, or other manufacturing plants, the pollution levels will drop, and there will be more "greenspace".

 

I might get alittle slamming for this but I can remember that even "back in the day" it wasnt that difficult to find USA made and/or marketed crap to buy. Alot of rims said "Japan" on them but were effectively marketed by speed shops. Ironically those vintage JAPAN rims fetch nice bux today.

Names like spark-o-matic, kraco, ... heck even CalCustom .... IMO were all pretty much bottom of the line products. A couple of cheesy tach suppliers from those days also come to mind ... again, whos vintage status makes us forget they were basement products back then.

My point, as long as there is a market for it crap will always be marketed.

 

Rose colored glasses.

Plenty of stuff was made like crap back in the good 'ol days right here in the good 'ol US of A as well. If we want to get up on a high horse, let's at least be honest about it.

One example on chrome; my first car was an OT muscle car back in the early 80's. It came with then standard chrome Cragar SS mag wheels. Not sure how old they were at the time but I can guarantee they were old enough to be made in the US at the time, but the chrome was so bad on them it was peeling off in sheets. The car itself from the early 70's was less than 10 years old at the time and wasn't in much better shape itself. But, it was all I could afford, so off went the wheels first chance I could get and salvaged the car enough to make it reasonably usable for a teenager for a few years.

But, here is a solution to the problem, volunteer to move your family next to toxic waste dumps like most chrome shops were back in the good 'ol days and make a racket to keep them in business and just refuse to buy all of the off shore crap yourself. Make the solution start with yourself personally instead of blaming everyone else for your problems. I'm tired of everyone whining about everything these days, getting old. I don't want to live next to Love Canals just so you can have good cheap USA chrome. If you want good USA chrome, just call up ChromePlaterJosh. From what I hear he does a bang up job and I suspect runs a pretty upstanding shop as well. Support people who are actually trying to do good things instead of longing for the days when people just went around dumping their problems on everyone else just so they could make a cheap easy buck.

 

I wonder if these folks would agree with you about the EPA...


In 1982, the Missouri Department of Health and the federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC) inform residents of Times Beach, Missouri that their town was contaminated when the chemical dioxin was sprayed on its unpaved roads, and that the town will have to be evacuated and demolished. By February, the federal and state governments had spent $36 million to buy every house in town except one (its owners, lifelong residents of Times Beach, refused to sell). In 1985, the city was officially disincorporated.
Times Beach was founded in 1925 as a part of a newspaper promotion: A 6-month subscription to The St. Louis Times plus an extra $67.50 bought a 20-by-100–foot lot along an unsettled stretch of the Meremec River. The town never became the booming resort that the newspaper had intended; instead, it evolved into a lower-middle–class hamlet of about 2,000 people. It was located just off Route 66, a two-lane highway that ran from Chicago to Los Angeles and was once was one of the major routes across the American Southwest.
Unfortunately, Times Beach never had the money to pave its roads, and all the dust kicked up by cars and trucks was a real nuisance. In 1972, town officials thought they'd found a perfect solution to the problem: they paid local waste-hauler Russell Bliss just 6 cents per gallon to spray its roads with oil, theoretically gluing the dust to the ground.
Bliss got the oil for free the year before, when a chemical manufacturer that had made most of its money selling napalm to the military paid him to get rid of its waste materials. He mixed six truckloads of that waste--which turned out to be hexachlorophene tainted with dioxin, a dangerous chemical that, once absorbed, can remain in the human body for more than 10 years--with a tankful of used motor oil. Next, he sprayed this carcinogenic cocktail all over town.
The children of Times Beach loved sliding around in Bliss' purple-tinted goo, and no one gave the substance a second thought until animals (particularly horses, who had contact with Bliss-sprayed roads and barn floors and riding rings every day, all year round) started dropping dead. Soon people started to get sick, too. In 1979, the EPA came to town and took soil samples, and in 1982 the agency announced that the levels of dioxin--"the most potent cancer-causing agent made by man," the newspaper said--in Times Beach were off the charts. The agency evacuated the town just after Christmas. In all, the agency spent $250 million and incinerated 265,000 tons of dioxin-tainted soil.

 

I'm right there with you. I buy made in the U.S.A. whenever I can. If its not maybe I don't need it that bad.

 

You can blame 100,000 different things. I'll try and keep this the short version of my opnion why things are the way they are. Go back to the 80's. USA made quality was some of the worst ever. New cars,repops. electronics, etc. we were getting our ass kicked 7 ways to sunday in the early days of a global market. Americans wanted the american dream, myself and my family included. Problem was, the amrican dream is expensive. So, we all demanded more wages, better benefits, more retirement. All this money comes from somewhere within the American company. Something had to give, so quality went down, prices went up, and here we are today.

We still want the American dream, we want to save our hard earned money by spending the least to get the most, and we want the wages to have a good living.


So, modern economics 101. We live in a global economy, we have to be able to compete in a global market. Its hard to do that when competing with 3rd world countries where the wages are less than 25% of what we pay here. There is no retirement, most countries have government healthcare or none at all.

We all demand the quality of life we feel we are entitled to, yet we want it for the lowest possible bidder.

Even our government plays this way. Lowest bidder gets the government jobs. Notice most cop bikes these days are Kawasaki's? Harley can't compete with the price and most government jobs MUSt pay out to the lowest bidder by law.


So we all want to buy American but we want it for a cheap price, But, we all want high wages, benefits and great retirement. Take your choice, but you can't have all of them.


Scot

 

I started a similar post a couple weeks ago it went all political. so it is just a rant. I wanted a list of companies that were USA based and HAMB friendly. what I got was
WE HAVE THE BEST POLITICIANS THAT MONEY CAN BUY
good luck with this one

 

I don't agree, i think you can blame the cheap bastards that decided dumping the toxins out back instead of disposing of them properly and responsibly brought it on. I like clean water and clean air.

and that's just one of many such stories.

We have 2 semi-local chrome shops that do decent work, they are expensive, I'm willing to pay a little more if they're not destroying the environment.

 

That's the thing, I don't blame politicians, or the EPA or anyone else other than myself and all the other Americans that have stood by and let this happen. We happily motor off to Walmart in our Toyotas to buy junk that will break in two weeks just so we can do it all over again and then we act surprised when our jobs are shipped overseas. It's our own damn fault. No more for me. I'll go without if it means I can't buy it from home.

 

I saw a thread yesterday about 'Affordable American tools'...and I thought

"shouldn't the question be 'What's it costing you NOT to buy American?'"

 

this is a good site, just wanted to re up it incase someone didnt see it. instead of going the political route.

 

the crappy cheap stuff has always been around.It's just getting harder to find the good stuff as both of our countries give our manufacturing base over to asian countries.now we're even getting chineese cars [great wall they're called here ]They can't even make a toaster properly so how the hell can they make a car.My family doesn'tbuy any shit from China,it's pretty hard sometimes to find but we make the effort .sometimes we can't avoid it but we try to support our own country.damn, commies give em nothing

 

Z, we do agree. My reply was the Readers Digest version. The issue is so deep that it really is a long answer. Yours is part A, mine is part B.

 

I just have to give you some hell every now and then.

 

The "Good stuff", USA made stuff, would cost a whole lot more than just a few more bucks.

If it was truly cheaper to make parts here, they would be made here.

 

I must recuse myself as the HP computer I am using has a Made in China sticker on it.

 

Yep, the buying of the cheap crap costs us all more in the long run than buying better quality and US made goods would...

Well, not only are those Kawasaki's made here at this point, but they are superior bikes. Faster, better handling, more reliable. The big bike for the police here at this point are BMW's. Harley can't compete because they won't. When Eric Buell finally got a truly competitive engine for the Buells Harley cut them loose.

 

Yeah ok, more than a dollar or two but do I really need to save 40 cents on a can of spray paint made in China, do I really need to save $20 on a tire made in Taiwan. Can I get by paying an extra $50 for an American made wheel for my Hot Rod. YUP! And by doing so my money goes to someone in America where it will be used again and again (hopefully) and some of it may end up coming back to me, If it hits China it will only be used to buy up more of the US's debt and held over our heads to let in more Chinese crap.

Henry Ford once had this crazy idea that if he paid a man a decent wage that he would be able to be one of his customers... He actually believed that making something affordable didn't have to mean making crap. Crazy huh?

 

Who do you think you are, interjecting facts, rational thought and reason into this argument!

 

Yep. Harley isn't interested in selling police bikes. If they were, they would have pushed the Buell Ulysses, which actually would be an excellent choice. Innovation is not welcome here.

 

Dont much care for chrome i like rust!!!!!!!!