On Craigslist, in the for sale / wanted / musi­cal instru­ments sec­tion, some­one posts the fol­low­ing plea:

Do not buy any­thing being made in China… Do not buy any equip­ment made in for­eign coun­tries. Sup­port the coun­try and only buy amer­i­can. All of those amps made over­seas are crap. Save your money and buy either amer­i­can or eng­land. Here is the list of 5 amps that you should get or save up for.

The writer rec­om­mends a hand­ful of bou­tique and vin­tage elec­tric gui­tar amps of appar­ent US / UK origin.

I appre­ci­ate the sen­ti­ment, but unfor­tu­nately it’s a bit more com­pli­cated than that. Here’s an exam­ple. I can buy a Chinese-made Epi­phone hollow-body elec­tric gui­tar for around $350 (give or take), or the same gen­uine Gib­son gui­tar for around $3500. The Chi­nese ver­sion looks gor­geous and plays rea­son­ably well, plus for a few hun­dred dol­lars I can hot-rod it and still have a sub-$1000 gui­tar that rivals its Nashville-built counterpart.

That’s an obvi­ous eco­nomic ratio­nale for buy­ing from China. But now on top of this, con­sider that in 2009, Gib­son was voted by its own employ­ees as the #1 worst employer in Amer­ica. It takes a lot of ques­tion­able prac­tices to achieve a result like this, and gives pause to which actu­ally is more un-American — giv­ing money to China or sup­port­ing a domes­tic com­pany whose employ­ees seem to deeply dislike.

I don’t have an answer to this, except to note that as fast as Amer­i­can com­pa­nies race to the bot­tom in how they out­source, com­pen­sate and oth­er­wise treat their staff, they are dou­bling down on why it’s so easy to buy imported prod­ucts these days.

I will fiercely sup­port any busi­ness that cares for its employ­ees and cus­tomers; and offers full-time salaries, health­care and oppor­tu­ni­ties for advance­ment. But when a domes­tic com­pany behaves more like its over­seas coun­ter­part at ten times the price, my pur­chase deci­sion becomes a bit blurry.

Ref­er­ences

Gib­son atop worst-places-to-work list (NashvillePost.com)

Posted on April 14th, 2010 by Sky
Filed under: Economy, Society