| Author | Message | ||
     Thepup |
Court,once again you still haven't answered the question,I guess you have just not directly.Cost is one of the reasons they sourced them out to China not because they were absolutely the best quality.Court,I have to admit,you would make a great politician.Spin,Spin,Spin. | ||
| Brucelee |
I will take a stab at this. Cost is unidimensional and very easily measured, IF widget A is equal to widget B, the cost is something we can figure out pretty quickly. Quality is more subjective and INCLUDES the factor of cost. In my world, Quality includes: Cost Fitness for purpose-how well will it perform its function? Fit and Finish-How does it look and feel? Defect rate-how many defects per 1000 produced? Durability-mean time to failure And the list could go on. So, COST is ONE factor of many in the quality equation. Folks may go to China for a part due to its cost advantage but if they have any smarts, they weight ALL of the other factors before they choose one source vs another. Chinese goods of course, can score high on any quality scale, just as can goods from the USA. Depends on the manufacturer. Hope that helps. | ||
| Thepup |
Court starts with the insults,who would have ever thought.Court,you said that Buell shops around for the best,that to me says they want the best,not the best for a certain price.Let me repeat I understand why Buell sources the wheels out,and I have never said they were not good,although the powdercoat quality is in question.Sorry I am not likea little kid looking at one of their heroes when you talk about Buell.Lets agree Court,Buell sources the wheels out to China because they get the quality they want for the price they pay. | ||
| Court |
Pup, right you are. . . I was a dandy politician. I am hampered by two things, abject honesty and a crippling patience for explaining things to folks who won't listen. Do me, actually Ye Pup, a favor and ignore everything I said and just read the Brucelee post above. We are trying to explain to you that COST is only ONE component. Work with me here. Court - "No Bueller Left Behind" | ||
| Thepup |
Bruce I understand why Buell goes to China for their wheels,thats not my argument,I don't really have an argument,but to say they went to China for the best is laughable,cost did play a part.You know the old saying"you get what you pay for" | ||
| Brucelee |
Well I never said that Buell goes to China for the best wheels. I would never use that term, way to vague. For example, what is the "best" wheel that Buell could buy anywhere in the world? Answer-it depends on how you define best. Is it Lasts the longest strongest Lightest Best looking Best balanced? More or least costly? If you go back to my post on quality, best very much depends on how your weight all those criteria. You are correct that in the end, if overall quality as the buyer defines it is equal, cost will tip the equation. Which to the economist in me, is the way it ought to be. | ||
| Thepup |
Funny thing is here is I never said anything about the quality,my original point was ppl complaining about Wal-Mart because of a number of things,one being they sell products made in China,I pointed out Buells contain parts made in China wich Court replied with"By the way, "Global Sourcing" is more than a science of shopping the world's flea markets for the cheapest....it is an engineering discipline (at least Lars elevated to one, perhaps a science) that shops the world for the BEST" I merely said that Buell gets their wheels from China for Price not because they are the "BEST".You keep defending Buell and insulting someone that get's it. | ||
| Thepup |
Bruce,Court says they shop the world for the best,not you.My above post expains that. | ||
| Smitty |
To the Walmart sucks comments. We are all guilty in looking out for our own interests. How many of you own a Motorola stereo made in the USA a Zenith TV? I buy domestic when I can and I am IBEW member. The thing that bothers me is the do as I say not as I do attitude. WE ARE ALL HIPOCYRITES Thepup Buell isn’t a super high production super high volume deal here. The Chinese company may be the only company willing to build the wheel to the specs that Buell demanded in a low volume (remember this isn’t a big company and a thing like a wheel is kinda important). The head light swing arm frame and switchgear I think was made in Italy not the lowest place to outsource. The gold coloring because it is translucent it will be tough no matter where it will be done. Life is short enjoy it while you are able Tim | ||
| Smitty |
Court Lineman job is bad Hazardous. We lost a couple of brothers this year. My wife is glad I only have to go as high as the bottom of the can. Tim | ||
| Cochise |
Now then to bring this thread full circle: Spike, I talked to a fella who works at the Home Office. He told me that at least with the Laptops, they had about 350,000 distributed to Supercenters across the Country, which worked out to be about 50 per store. At two or three of our S.C.'s they handed out fifty slips of paper out to the people in line stating what they were buying. I will still get email addresses and phone numbers and names for you on Monday | ||
| Jon |
Court, For a lineman, you got literarey game. "No Bueller Left Behind"...priceless | ||
| Oldog |
Court: Did you ever work at the Power station for KPL there near topeka? My uncle Williard (Bill) Bryant was an employee there for many years just wondered if you ever made his acquantaince(sp)? | ||
| Oddbawl |
So this guy walks into a bar... his friend ducks. Boo-yah! | ||
| Court |
>>>>Did you ever work at the Power station for KPL there near topeka? There are two. To the East is Tecumseh, an old coal fired plant built in my Grandad's day. . . he died a year before I was born. To the West is the Jeffrey Energy Center, named after Balfour Jeffrey. I did not work at the powerplant. I built the 345kv substation to the South of the plant and did the 345kv Sulphur Hexaflouride Westinghouse breakers in the switchyard. I, working for my Dad, worked on all the 115kv, 230kV and 345kV lines coming into the plant (except the 1 115kV done by Captitol Electric). The line coming from Council Grove remains, to this day, the fastest a line (on a per mile basis) was ever built and Dad used, for the fist time in the utility industry, a helicopter (from St. Louis Helicopters, we later used Evergreen for bare hand transmission maintenance) in building a powerline. By the way, this is ALSO the only line on which I have had a person have a Remington 870 stuck in their mouth and marched in to town, forced to call, and held at gunpoint until their boss (in this case, Dale Luthye) arrived. In those days in Kansas, it wasn't a crime it was just someone who got "a little upset". I still have the front page of the Kansas City Star with the article. There are a host of other plants in the area. Those were the BEST of times......er, with best, of course, making no reference to the cost or the $3.11 union scale I was making. | ||
| Court |
$3,900,000,000 on Visa cards yesterday as 10,000,000 folks flocked to Wal-Mart and Wal-Mart (already the world's leading distributor of music and video) announces new media deal. I agree much of what they do offends me, but as GM prepared to close 9 plants and layoff 40,000 as a result of their inability to pay their bills, Wal-Mart is obviously demonstrating a model that works, at least for the present day. We, I fear, collectively are in the process of proving we say one thing and do another. Cost, pure and simple, an empirical analysis, would dictate is EVERYTHING. Where would you buy your wheels if, out of 15,000 bikes in one year, you expected only 1 or 2 folks to take you to task for the powdercoating? Australia at $200 per wheel or China at $60 per wheel? Where is the "threshold" of your value system? If it were $1 difference, would you pay for the more expensive ones". . . how about $5, $50. Again, it's elasticity of demand in motion. How much, and there is a firm $$ amount, can the price change, either up or down, before price (alone) impacts demand. Many of you, I am sure, remember the fabled curve and the economic theory of equilibrium. Fact is, this is just as much a part of making and marketing a motorcycle as horsepower. This is America. NOTHING happens until someone sells something. | ||
| Thepup |
So Court,price is the reason they are made in China,not quality,not saying they are not good wheels,just that they are made in China for the price. | ||
| Mr_grumpy |
Don't forget transportation costs, buyers trips to far flung places to do the deal (& have a paid vacation), business lunches, business dinners, business breakfasts, ahem room service! & all that stuff too, plus the mobile phone calls home while they're away, there's a lot of hidden costs.  Damn shame they don't build Volvo trucks in Bali, eh? | ||
| Old_mil |
Here is reality: The Chinese don't have $60 a month phone bills or $150 a month fuel bills or $200 a month home heating bills. The vast majority of people who work in these Chinese factories for $1 a day live in huts with chickens and pigs or 3 generations to an apartment the size of a Manhattan efficiency and ride mass produced bicycles to work. It is impossible for the American worker - no matter how much he would desire to do so - to compete with the Chinese worker because of the cost of living in the United States. The past thirty years have been an economic shell game in America with our decreasing standard of living masked by (first) the two income family and (second) debt. That game is now late in the fourth quarter and the home team is finally going to catch sight of the scoreboard and wonder how in the world they ended up on the short end of such a big blowout. | ||
| Oldog |
Court: I believe that my uncle worked at Tecumseh, (not sure) there was an explosion at the place where he worked,(tec) because of problems with the gas feed, He (My uncle) retired many years ago, I was just curious if you might have encountered him. I have One remaining uncle who lives a few blocks from Topeka HD, On my last visit we had coffee at the shop, My uncle "Butch" and I took in the Musem down stairs, Your pics brought back some good memories for me, thanks for sharing.. | ||
| Brucelee |
Forget China, it is INDIA that is the bad guy! Chinese wages are double those in India China's wage demands are often double those in India, study finds James Bennett, Management Consultancy, 14 Nov 2005 ADVERTISEMENT Multinational companies seeking to set up lower-cost operations in Asia will face higher wage costs in China than in India, according to a study by Mercer Human Resource Consulting. The report showed that the average base pay was higher in China than in India in 95% of the 42 job roles examined. While pay differences were less stark at lower levels, some senior managers and professionals in China were found to earn more than double their counterparts in India. The survey found that HR managers in China earn an average of £16,600 compared with £7,900 in India, while project managers and financial analysts earn £12,200 and £6,900 respectively in China compared with £5,200 and £4,400 in India. At the lower end of the salary scale, customer service assistants receive £1,300 a year in China compared with just £800 in India, while skilled production workers earn £1,200 compared with £1,000 in India. Mark Sullivan, worldwide partner at Mercer, said: 'While it is far cheaper to employ staff in both China and India than Europe or the US, India appears to have the advantage of slightly lower wage costs. 'Although wage costs are lower in India, there is a high demand for skilled workers there, particularly at the executive level. If demand continues to outweigh supply then we can expect wages to increase substantially over the next few years.' 'The challenge for employers is to make sure they retain their top staff and equip lower-level employees with the necessary skills to move up the organisation', Sullivan added. | ||
| Ducxl |
Court said: "Australia at $200 per wheel or China at $60 per wheel?" Well i'd prefer to save up till i could afford the $200. The problem is with the "i want it now dammit!" syndrome I swore off Levis' jeans completely when they shuttered the U.S. plants and i'm HOPING now for their bankruptcy.That said,i now pay $140-$180 for my U.S. manufactured "AG" jeans. And what old_mil posted just abouve really scares me....EEEEKKKKK! | ||
| Brucelee |
Don't worry, we are going to export something to China that will resolve the issue! Hey, if you can't cut it here, perhaps the Chinese are buying? AFL-CIO Petitions to Raise Chinese Wages Dissident says workers in both countries will benefit In the first-ever U.S. trade petition on behalf of workers in the U.S. and abroad, the AFL-CIO -- backed by the UAW -- argues that the brutal oppression of Chinese workers is a violation of U.S. trade laws. The AFL-CIO petition, filed on March 16, cites Section 301 of the U.S. Trade Law of 1974, which specifically identifies repression of workers' rights as an unfair trade practice. Artificially low wages in China, the labor federation argues, create unfair competition, by artificially lowering the price of goods manufactured in China. The result is that hundreds of thousands of U.S. jobs are shifted overseas - and those still employed have jobs are pressured to reduce wages and benefits to stay "competitive." The effort by U.S. unions to raise wages in China drew support from Wei Jingsheng, a leading Chinese dissident. "We think the goods produced by Chinese labor should have a higher price," says Wei, a former electrician who was exiled from China after he became a prominent advocate of democratic reform. "It's very important to have fair competition between American and Chinese workers." China's factory workers are mostly young women who migrate from rural areas to supplement their family income. They must negotiate a rigid system of internal passport control "similar to the control of black workers in apartheid South Africa" in order to land a factory job. Independent unions are banned in China; the only "union" workers can join is the official All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), which supports the government policy of keeping wages low to attract foreign investment. Factory managers often serve double duty as union "officers" - or they handpick those who hold the positions. In either case, the ACFTU is required by Chinese law to obey the directives of the Chinese Communist Party. But Chinese workers must have independent unions, argues Wei Jingsheng, in order to raise their own living standards. "I think its' very important," he says, "to ask your government to put pressure on the Chinese government, and guarantee Chinese workers the right to protest." Labor repression in China, the AFL-CIO petition estimates, has lowered Chinese wages by 47 to 86%. China's low wages are illegally siphoning U.S. jobs overseas. The AFL-CIO petition estimates that the U.S. has lost between 727,000 and 1.29 million jobs as a result China's illegal repression of worker rights. Clyde South, former UAW Local 662 unit chair at Magnequench, saw 200 of his co-workers lose their jobs when his company closed its magnet factory in Indiana and relocated operations to China. "They get about $20 bucks a week, and we get $20 an hour," he says. "We've got to do something to level the playing field so that workers can make a decent wage. It's not shameful for the working man to earn a decent wage." | ||
| Swampy |
I concur with Old_mil Unfortunately and I don't have anything else to say. | ||
| Brucelee |
".That said,i now pay $140-$180 for my U.S. manufactured "AG" jeans. " Well, it is YOUR money, but I buy mine at LL Bean for $19.95. Lifetime warranty too! | ||
| Brucelee |
Free Trade and jobs. By my friend Prof. Sowell Some years ago, the distinguished international-trade economist Jagdish Bhagwati was visiting Cornell University, giving a lecture to graduate students during the day and debating Ralph Nader on free trade that evening. During his lecture, Professor Bhagwati asked how many of the graduate students would be attending that evening’s debate. Not one hand went up. Amazed, he asked why. The answer was that the economics students considered it to be a waste of time. The kind of silly stuff that Ralph Nader was saying had been refuted by economists ages ago. The net result was that the audience for the debate consisted of people largely illiterate in economics, and they cheered for Nader. Professor Bhagwati was exceptional among leading economists in understanding the need to confront gross misconceptions of economics in the general public, including the so-called educated public. Nobel laureates Milton Friedman and Gary Becker are other such exceptions in addressing a wider general audience, rather than confining what they say to technical analysis addressed to fellow economists and their students. By and large, the economics profession fails to educate the public on the basics, while devoting much time and effort to narrower and even esoteric research. The net result is that fallacies flourish in discussions of economic policy issues, while the refutations of those fallacies lie dormant in old books and academic journals gathering dust on library shelves. As former House majority leader Dick Armey—an economist by trade—put it: “Demagoguery beats data in making public policy.” Sometimes the fallacies are based on something as simple as a failure to define terms accurately. Everyone has heard the claim that a high-wage country like the United States loses jobs to low-wage countries when there is free trade. When the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect a decade ago, there were dire predictions of “a giant sucking sound” as American jobs were drawn away, to Mexico especially. In reality, the number of jobs in the United States increased by millions after NAFTA went into effect and the unemployment rate fell to low levels not seen in years. Behind the radically wrong predictions was a simple confusion between wage rates and labor costs. Wage rates per unit of time are not the same as labor costs per unit of output. When workers are paid twice as much per hour and produce three times as much per hour, the labor costs per unit of output are lower. That is why high-wage countries have been exporting to low-wage countries for centuries. An international study found the average productivity of workers in the modern sector of the Indian economy to be 15 percent of that of American workers. In other words, if you paid the average Indian worker one-fifth of what you paid the average American worker, it would cost you more to get the job done in India. In particular industries, such as computer software, Indian workers are more comparable, which is why there is so much outsourcing of computer work to India. But virtually every country has a comparative advantage in something, whether it is a high-wage country or a low-wage country. Those who complain loudly about how many jobs have been “exported” to other countries because of international free trade totally ignore all the jobs that have been imported to the American economy because of that same free trade. Siemens alone employs tens of thousands of American workers, and Toyota has already produced its ten millionth car in the United States. Management guru Peter Drucker has said that this country imports far more jobs than it exports, and no one has contradicted him. Indeed, those who are loudest in denouncing the exporting of jobs totally ignore the importing of jobs. Free international trade produces both the benefits of increased productivity and the adjustment problems that all other forms of increased productivity produce—namely, job losses in the less competitive firms and industries. The typewriter industry was devastated by the rise of the computer, as the horse and buggy industry was devastated by the rise of the automobile. Histories of the industrial revolution lament the plight of the hand-loom weavers when power looms were introduced. | ||
| Spike |
Wow, I post a rant about Wal-Mart lying about a laptop and six pages later we're discussing the quality of XB wheels and the cost of living in China. I love the internet.  Back to laptop deals- tigerdirect.com has a weekend special on an Acer laptop that's $499 after rebates: http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?sku=A180-11 60&CMP=ILC-FPM03 It's not quite as cheap as the HP from wal-mart, but it's got a larger, widescreen display and a hotter processor. It's still short on ram, but that's an easy low-cost upgrade. I'm not familiar with Acer computers, but I've used their monitors quite a bit and I love them. The deal ends Monday at noon, so if you want to get one you should get your order in soon. | ||
| Spike |
Talk about timing . . . Within an hour of me placing an order with Tiger Direct I get this email from the customer service department at wal-mart:
My letter to them wasn't a complaint about the length of the "promotional period" nor the number of laptops available. My complaints to them were not honoring the start time of the promotional period and changing the price of the item on the day of the sale. I'm wondering if they even read my letter at all before firing off a friendly letter of corporate bravo-sierra. The more I think about it the more this letter pisses me off. I'm a sucker for apologies. A simple "we screwed up, we're sorry" or a "we'll try harder next time" would have earned my forgiveness and had me back as a customer, but to feed me this back-handed, "We're sorry if not every customer is able to get the item they want every time" is just plain insulting. They might as well have said, "we have good deals, we're not sorry." Way to go wal-mart. Thanks for adding insult to injury. | ||
| Outrider |
So what did you expect from a Chinese Outlet Store? | ||
| Cochise |
Spike, trust me, wait until tomorrow. My wife is going to find the name of who you NEED to talk to. You may not get a new laptop, but you SHOULD at least get a proper apology. You got a form letter for the purpose of shutting somebody up. They see in the heading or whatever else:I didn't get a laptop. |
