On Mon, 17 Jan 2011 21:58:01 -0500, wrote:

On Mon, 17 Jan 2011 16:37:51 -0800, jps wrote:

It wasn't always that way. Sam Walton refused to purchase anything
that wasn't made in the USA.

He's dead and so is his patriotism.

The interesting thing is pretty much all of America followed the lead
of the Walton kids.
Sam sr invented the concept of "Market Driven Quality". Basically
don't give the customer more quality than he will pay for.
When Gerstner took over IBM he embraced this idea. We threw away our
"six sigma" quality hats, stopped emulating Sony and got our MDQ hat
http://gfretwell.com/electrical/mdq.jpg
Real quality went out the window. We gave the customer what the
cheapest one was willing to pay for and being the industry leader,
everyone else followed. Now when you call for service, you get a guy
in India. Under Gerstner IBM reduced their US staff by about 45% and
made a **** load of money.

The Walton kids figured out the American public was of the same mind.
They would always buy the cheapest product, giving up quality for
price and the best place to find those products was China. They had
their old Little Rock neighbor (and spouse of a former board member)
in the White House to ease any trade restrictions so off they went to
China looking for cheap products. The rest is history. WalMart went
from an also ran, regional chain store to the biggest retailer in the
world in a decade.

It really doesn't matter whether you look at retailers, airlines or
computer systems, we seem to be giving up quality and service for a
cheap price. Buy it cheap, use it up and throw it away.

I agree with you, basically. The issue is that cheaper isn't
necessarily better when it comes to the public welfare. That's why I
don't believe corporations can possibly do the right thing in that
regard... at least not without appropriate regulation and oversight.