Consumers aren't just spending too much; they're spending too much for too little from China
A few months ago I resolved to stop buying Chinese goods. My motivation was not political. It was simply that that oftentimes things made in China seemed to break easier than things which were manufactured in other places. I grew tired of buying replacements.
Electronics from China fall apart sooner than one would expect.
I purchased an MP3 player made in China last August. By Thanksgiving it was missing a button and the ear plugs had shorted out. A watch, bought to replace an American made one I had worn for years, became useless after its band broke, only weeks after I started wearing it. I paid over a hundred dollars for a small, battery powered vacuum, only to realize that it grew weaker each time I charged it. All of these items were made in China and all of them had to be replaced .
My employer had me in temporary housing for several months. I was in a one bedroom apartment renting at the price of a three bedroom, so I expected it to look upscale. It did. But it only appeared high-end, despite the cost it was low-budget from floor to ceiling. That little thing, which holds the roll of toilet paper and probably has a formal name, broke several days after I moved in. It was made from some sort of fake marble. Seen from a distance it suggested craftsmanship, timelessness. Seen after it had broken was the stamp: Made in China .
The kitchen included a set of utensils, prominently displaying the logo of the chic store where they were purchased. Two of these knives snapped at the handle while I carved a pumpkin last Halloween . I had, in the past, always used kitchen knives to make Jack o Lanterns (theyre scarier when poorly shaped). But these Chinese knives, even with the logo of the well-regarded store on them, sent me searching for my Swiss Army knife.
Electronics again. The remote control, the heart of any American household, stopped working after it fell from the kitchen counter. The property manager had made it a point to show me the remote and the TV. It's a Sony . A few weeks later I was using a broomstick to switch back and forth between The Office and the soccer game (no TiVo when youre in temporary housing), since my Chinese made Sony remote control had failed to survive its fall.
Chinese goods are inferior not because the Chinese are incapable of making quality products. This is a country that manufactures nuclear submarines and launches people into space. The Chinese are more than able to make knives which don't snap or remotes that continue to work after a four foot fall onto carpet. The problem is that what first lured American businesses to China, the low cost of production, is now sought by American consumers for all, even high-end, products. We have become spoiled. The broomstick I used to replace my broken remote might have been Chinese made. That's fine; the quality of a Chinese broomstick and an American broomstick is likely the same; but for more complex items, consumers should look to more than just cost.
This trend evolved, I suspect, by the American consumers demand for not just cheaper products, but unreasonably cheap products. The problem is especially noteworthy in items which would traditionally be high-priced because they were artfully crafted. It is bred from a willingness to sacrifice quality for affordability, provided the outward appearance of quality is still maintained. An exchange of true value for perceived value. American vanity (and the marketing forces which exploit that vanity) drives consumers toward labels and brands they envision as high-class. But they either do not have or do not want to spend the money for what is truly worthy of a premium: unique items. Instead they settle for impostors.
But fakes can never fully capture the value of the original, and frequently, their inauthenticity casts the attempt at sophistication as failed, if not laughable.
I collect antique maps with a focus on 16 th century cartography of the Caribbean. I am disgusted to see that advertisers now offer classic and collectible reproductions of antique maps, made in China . What vexes me most is that these items are presented as a gateway to urbanity. Buy this fake map for a fraction of what a real one would cost, put it on your wall, and youll look sophisticated. Authenticity and beauty are passed on for affordability and superficiality. The buyer receives an object to display, but not even a hint of the profound and immeasurable joy one gets when contemplating a map carefully drafted by an artisan five centuries ago.
Furniture once sculpted by tradesmen in North Carolina is now assembled piecemeal in Asia . Craftsmanship isn't sought so much as possession: Look what I have, it was bought at that store that everyone goes to and it was expensive.
American jewelry stores sell precious stones, one of the few items which are still of themselves distinctive, but the stores are increasingly fronts for a national chain, the stones carved overseas, the settings made there as well, each sale a single line in an itemized report back to headquarters in New York or London . Where is the uniqueness? Where is the unpredictability? Where is the tradecraft of a single person? Where is the romance?
Do consumers realize that these fake maps, Chinese-made end tables, and assembly-line manufactured wedding rings arrive here on the same container ships, via the same railroad lines, in the back of the same truck? That they are haphazardly loaded into the rear of mass produced shops according to an inventory and sales plan, and then sold to them by an employee who had no involvement in the products creation? That what they are buying is not a finely crafted good, but first a task, then cargo, then a stock number? Do they even care, so long as what they get is what they think they're supposed to have? If they knew, would it impact their sense of self-worth, knowing that their valuable is just an item, recently just a sterile number in a corporation's inventory?
As the national economy slowly wakes up from a decade of highly-leveraged McMansions and leased $50,000 SUVs, it is apparent that the American consumers overindulgence isnt just confined to spending more than they have. They're buying things that aren't really the quality items they think they are.
The value of what we value has been diluted by the increasing substitution of American made products with Chinese made ones. (It's not always Chinese for American, of course, sometimes its Vietnamese for Canadian or even slighter distinctions, such as Malaysian for Korean, but the trends are the same: cheaper products from cheaper labor pools). This Chinflation, the decreasing intrinsic value of material acquisitions due to an increasing demand for the appearance of quality over true worth, is fueled by the American publics eagerness to have, ironically, the best labels. But what to do when the best labels, in the past a shortcut to determining quality, no longer indicate the best items? The result is consumers with more stuff, but more stuff with less value.
Traditional bastions of quality in clothing are an easy example of this trend. The storied Ralph Lauren Polo brand, it seems to a longtime patron of the company, is no longer distinguishable in quality from the generic brands bought at Wal-Mart. Whats a moderately thoughtful consumer to do? In the past it was easy to disguise vanity with alleged sensibility.
I hate paying $80 just to have a horse on my shirt, an Ivy League educated friend once told me, but the fact is, they make the best clothes.
Not anymore.
American companies manufacturing overseas are required to print in what country their items are made. But they arent required to tell you what else is being made in that factory. I toured an overseas textile operation which made name-brand shirts right next to generic ones. Some shirts went to department stores, others were sent off to schools to be used as gym clothes. Same labor, same material, same skill level. The only difference was the label and $20 markup.
I gave up on not buying Chinese goods. For one thing, blacklisting an entire nations items is not very fair. Many Chinese items are poorly made; some are not. Im not going to write off 1.3 billion people only because of some poor stitching on a watch band. I have had fairly good luck with, for example, auto parts and fishing equipment made in China . But even if I wanted to quit China , I can't. It is impossible to avoid Chinese goods. The Chinese manufacturing sector is so interwoven with the American retail industry that buying Chinese goods is unavoidable.
I shouldn't have to boycott goods. In our capitalist system the consumer drives the marketplace and, theoretically, the problem of inferior quality goods from China should correct itself. In China , ostensibly still a Communist country, the general political philosophy is that the collective well-being of society trumps the desires of the individual. Under this type of system I can see how uniqueness might be abandoned for the greater good. Collective society doesnt need the aesthetics of an antique map anymore than it does a shirt with a horse on it. What is important is steel production, canal building, the gross national product, tax revenues, and the rate of annual exports. But in our society, where I do what I want and not what the government thinks is best for everyone overall, isnt there still a place for truly premium goods? (Not the premium and VIP labels so often used by advertisers today to simply mark something up and then appeal to a consumers vanity that they have to have the highest level item).
Maybe there isn't. Maybe Americans are so excited about simply having the label, regardless of its actual value, that we dont care about the underlying quality. Maybe our psychology has driven our marketplace to mirror the directed, calculated, collective good Communist doctrine seeks, damn the eccentric wants of a few exceptionalists.
If that is the new trend then the demand for truly unique items, like old maps, might be expected to collapse. Why buy a fragile, faded map when you can order a crisp, colorful reproduction, with the logo to prove how expensive it was, from China ?
We might be moving that way as consumers, as a nation, and, eventually, as a global society; to a time when a rare map is so unappreciated that through a decrease in demand it becomes inexpensive. That what is valued are apparently expensive items, at an affordable price, deliberately bought with the understanding that when they break, we can go out and replace them with a new, equally poorly made one.
I'll still keep buying maps, no matter how cheaply they are sold for. An old maps true worth isnt what is printed on the price tag, but in the inestimable value of what is so artfully printed on the page. All objects, even aesthetic ones, can be damaged or broken, but intrinsic beauty cant be replaced.