Ha ha, actually, I'm in a "foreign" country (Poland, biggest producer of home applicances in Europe due to proximity to West EU markets and low cost of labor), so moving back is not what I would consider a good thing :)
Interesting, I didn't know that most appliance production happens in Poland. I was trying to find a general way of noting the production relationship between the US and China, but I know not everyone here is from the US and not all countries ship manufacturing off to China. Maybe the "foreign" country remark was a bit too general.
Obviously there will always be a cheapest place to manufacture things, but seeing the difference from when things were manufactured "in-house" in the US years ago and how they function now, it's night and day. People are sold on features, not longevity...but I would much rather have fridge that lasts 30 years and keeps my food cold than one that orders new food online when I'm out and breaks after 2 years and can't be repaired.
I want there to be a more realistic balance between cost and longevity so the things we put so much resources into building don't just end up in a landfill two years after their creation. We're offsetting economic costs in exchange for environmental costs. It's an enormous debt that we'll have to pay back soon.
> Interesting, I didn't know that most appliance production happens in Poland.
From what I've read, their weight and bulkiness makes shipping from Asia to Europe costly, and this negates the potential gains from moving production to say China.
> Obviously there will always be a cheapest place to manufacture things, but seeing the difference from when things were manufactured "in-house" in the US years ago and how they function now, it's night and day.
I think these two events have a common root cause - the corporations have been trying to squeeze more and more profits, esp. since the seventies, which resulted in both sending production abroad and amping up planned obsolescence. As a counterexample, Russian appliances from the USSR era were actually pretty solid, with a lot of them going on for 20-30 years without repairs. It wasn't caused by rigorous manufacturing standards and QA (as the were both terrible/borderline nonexistant), but by good, simple designs which had longetivity as a design goal.
