Offcuts: Made in China By: Don Heisz
I am awaiting the day when I can go to the Dollar store and buy wood.
I already buy abrasive cutting discs at a local bargain store. They sell all manner of low-quality items for a low price. It’s a great place to buy batteries, for example, if you have something you only want to use for a few minutes. Say, you really only want to take one photo with your digital camera, you can buy a couple of AA batteries, use them once, then throw them away because they don’t have any power left in them.
The cutting discs are a different story, however. Somehow, they are pretty much the best cutting discs I have ever had. They are definitely the best in terms of price. They are 1/4 the price of the cheapest ones I can find in a real hardware store and they cut more metal.
I think that was just a matter of luck. And I still wonder why there are cutting discs opposite plastic food containers and salad tongs in the same aisle.
I think everything in that store is made in China. Now, there is a stigma associated with that sticker, the one that says “Made in China”. Everyone’s seen the sticker on the bottom of the souvenirs they brought back from Niagra Falls, Hawaii, London, Paris, and probably Beijing. The stickers are plastered all over the tin-foil-thin cookware you can get at an economy price in department stores. It’s also on cans of mushrooms. Anyway, that sticker is associated with low quality.
In the meantime, China is making practically everything anyone touches or looks at. My tablesaw, which is decidedly not low quality, was made in China. The majority of the tools I use, my drills and saws, were made in China. The screws I use for work are almost all made in China. And a simple fact emerges. China is obviously the factory of the world. And the quality of what they produce depends on what you want. If you want the lowest possible price for the forks and knives you sell in your store, they’ll cut the cost until the spoon edges are practically razor-thin. But if you want the highest quality heavy cast-iron cookware to sell in your boutique, they’ll make that, too. (I don’t think anything cast-iron is made anywhere else in the world, now. Although, I’m probably wrong about that.)
I was searching for screws on the internet, because I need to use a number of different kinds of screws for work. One of the sites I found linked to a Chinese manufacturer who would make the screws you want. You get to customize everything. So, if you want ultra-cheap screws that will twist off as soon as they’re subjected to any torque, they’ll make those. If you want screws that will drill through quarter-inch steel and then tap themselves in, they’ll make those, too. And the price difference doesn’t seem that great.
I, however, don’t have much use for a thousand pounds of screws. At least not of a single kind of screw.
I ended up ordering some screws from an American website that sells American-made and Chinese-made screws. The American-made screws are decently priced but they were the wrong type. The screws I needed were made in China. They’re not even close to low-quality.
So, I think it’s time to stop associating the ‘Made in China” sticker with cheap junk. They make everything and they make it the way we want it. We want to have bargain stores that sell salad spinners for $3 and dead batteries for fifty cents. We want can openers that stop being able to open cans after a few uses. We want to be able to go out and spend more money, a tiny amount at a time, just to stop sitting on the couch for a while. It fills a void, maybe.
And there’s always the very scary prospect that, once China finally does actually manufacture everything in the world, they’ll decide they should be as personally greedy as everyone else and raise their prices. I’m pretty sure that would be roughly equal to the polar ice-caps melting. And I also think it’s kind of inevitable.