I've made the label OT.
This is the sort of thing we talk about on OT here.
For a few iterations anyway :-)

> > > In a normally working free market economy the fact that a price is X
> > > automatically means that there is probably a way to get it for Y where
Y
> > > < X, iff you look hard enough and spend the extra effort.

Yes indeed !
There will almost always be someone (usually in region or country sized
groupings) who is more desperate to stay alive at any price than the most
desperate person that one has found to work for one so far. There will
almost always be officials and bosses and indeed governments who are more
corrupt and more willing to allow you to exp... whoops, utilise their
workers and populace than the ones one has found so far. There will almost
always be people whose children have a grteater capacity for work at an
earlier age than ...

Unfortunately, there are costs in maintaining a quality standard that your
customers will tolerate while still maintaining your "competitive advantage"
which makes this process a little slower than ones shareholders may wish.
Can't, unfortunately, be helped..

And so we move from made-in to assembled-in to
may-have-passed-through-here-when-customs-weren't-looking and from Japan &
Singapore to Mexico, Macau, China, Phillipines, India, Indonesia, Vitnam,
Bangladesh, ex Soviet ... (not in that order). I've yet to see made in
Somalia, but it will come.

Another problem is that some of these places have a very highly developed
sense of self worth and indignation and don't know their place and some
amongst them tend to make the "cost of doing business"  too high with
payments for services they offer not to render and cost of retrieving your
executives who they threaten to render. You won't see too much labelled made
in Bellarus or Chechnya. Yet.

Things are getting desperate though  - its getting harder and harder to find
a swea.... oops, facility, that will churn out a nice pair of runners for
$1US in all up labour costs that one can flick off at $US150 any day of the
week, let alone IC's, white goods and the rest. What we need is another
continent - where's Atlantis when we need it ???

>anyways, i had better not go off on that tangent because it will
> rapidly deteriorate into a serious rant. ;-D


Too late :-)




            Russell McMahon


PS - Some products that I have designed are made in Taiwan (and are
probablly labelled "Assembled in Austria" :-) )

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