09.26.10

Can’t Buy That Toilet: How ’bout a $180 blues harp

Posted in Made in China, Stumble and Fail at 11:17 am by George Smith

Readers know my mojo-free Mojo Deluxe blues & rock harmonica, made in China by slave labor for pasting to a cheap paperback instruction manual, is my metaphor for deindustrialization and major fail in this country.

Historically, the blues harmonica was made to be a cheap instrument, something anyone could afford, pick up and play a few tunes on. There is no justification for a “blues & rock” harmonica to be made in China, for a couple dimes, so it can be sold in the US.

The harmonica, by nature, was already cheap!

The Mojo Deluxe is such a good metaphor because it matched with the outsourcing of the US guitar industry, written about here two years ago.

It was described thusly, using the American brand Fender:

Turning back to the category of electric rock instrumentation, the all-encompassing history of Fender, “The Soul of Tone: Celebrating 60 Years of Fender Amps,” has something to say about American companies and the Chinese slave labor workforce.

Fender is THE American brand name in electric guitar amplifier. We’re going to skip rehashing most of its history in which it rose to prominence as a vendor of classic designs and then almost went completely out of business. Instead, we fast forward to today when Fender offers a dominating and broad line of electric guitar amplifiers, equalled only by Marshall and two other big American manufacturers, Peavey and Mesa Engineering. Because Fender offers a broad line, some of its amps are made in China.

Paradoxically, the book indicates Fender would rather not make inexpenive junk amplifiers for the dilettante. However, because of realities in the market, it must.

“In the old days, you walked into a music store and took whatever you could get your hands on,” says Fender’s Shane Nicholas to author Tom Wheeler.

“But over time, people have become much more demanding. They expect a lot of features at low prices…”

“There are a whole lot of inexpensive Chinese amps out there, and many of them offer plenty of features. We need to compete with that … anybody who makes a small entry-level amp has gone to Asia.”

Nicholas describes the cheap Fender Frontman amp as formerly being made in Mexico: “… and every dealer loves it and they’re all making money with it, and then a year later the same dealers say, “Hey, that’s too expensive!”

And it had become “too expensive” because it had been undercut by another western brand which has moved its manufacturing to China, making something similar but even cheaper. And Fender was compelled to move the amp’s manufacture to the same country.

Fender, like many other American companies, deserves condemning for the rationalization.

The company ceded its America-made brand for the everyman for essentially a glorified boutique shop, making custom guitars and craftsman instruments only for the wealthy or those few with major label contracts. It’s probably fair to say that not everyone who now works at Fender can afford to regularly buy the company’s select US-made goods unless they get a good employee discount.

They can, as an alternative, purchase the Chinese-made Fender-branded stuff.

And over the years DD has run into many musicians who marvel at their 99-dollar Chinese-made purchases without wondering why it is they can’t afford the US made good anymore. They give no real consideration to how their day job wages have either stagnated or been compressed.

And they don’t see any illogic in yakking about how they’ve upgraded the slave labor instrument with $100 dollars in replacement parts, also mostly made in China.

Which brings us back to harmonicas and the US model of “reindustrialization.” In this case, the revival of manufacturing on a very limited base, one which makes only boutique goods.

The only US manufacturer of harmonicas is a company called Harrison.

Its website is here.

In Rockford, Illinois, its facility is in a small part of the old Ingersoll machine tools manufacturing plant. Ingersoll was an American brand name, too. And because of US deindustrialization and slave labor in non-democratic Asian countries, it blew away in the wind. And unemployment in Rockford is devastating just like everywhere else.

The story of Harrison Harmonicas is well told in a clip from the BBC here.

It’s full of cognitive dissonance but does effectively get across the toll of deindustrialization in the heartland.

One can only marvel at the paradox of an instrument, which was — by nature — to be made cheaply, being designed on a super-expensive 3-D manufacturing machine.

Is there a market for the $180 harmonica?

Maybe.

A small one limited to, once again, the dilettante with money to burn, those who haven’t yet maxed out their credit cards, some pro musicians. In the plutonomy, you can have a consumer product manufacturing base, as long as its restricted to boutique stuff for the haves.

Certainly, when DD was regularly playing the dive bars in the old Lehigh Valley, a place very much victimized by deindustrialization, those who played harmonica would have had to think long and hard about whether they wished to spend 180 dollars for an instrument.

This does not, per se, reflect poorly on a company like Harrison Harmonicas. But it is to say they are not replacements for an America that makes things. And no matter how many of these businesses you now see profiled in news stories, they do not provide significant employment opportunities for average Americans. They do not replace the old Ingersolls or Bethlehem Steels.

They are, instead, a result of the ruinous path we’ve taken. One that puts you in the national blind alley of modern Swiss watch-making, high-end manufacturing making patently over-engineered and needlessly high tech things — extravagances, status symbols and frou-frou goods which can be pitched to the haves.

As for slave labor Mojo Deluxe blues & rock harmonicas?

They never really took off. The shopping cart link for them on the harmonica book author’s website is dead two years after it hit the market.

If you want one badly enough, you can still buy it on Amazon.

And DD — hah-hah — owns the top entry for the slave-labor made harp on Google.

And you can find one soul on YouTube, playing his Mojo Deluxe and strumming the blues on an offshore-made Fender Strat to backing from Apple’s Garageband. (Caveat: There’s some jump-on-the-grenade quality to it.)

Wait long enough and there’ll be some be-a-bluesman app for your iPhone. You won’t have to play the Fender Strat or Mojo Deluxe at all.

Nb: There was probably no success in store for the Mojo Deluxe because another American-named company was already marketing a slave-labor harmonica set, LoDuca.

Good news, lads ! Good news! The Mojo Deluxe starred in the video but was not actually played for it!

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Sunday wouldn’t be complete without Tom Friedman going on about the latest miraculous thing he’s discovered in China.

His examples this month are all obviously built on a trip to some sales convention there, an event where he’s discovered a few American carpet-baggers who’ve taken their money offshore for manufacturing.

Last week it was Mike Biddle and his above-ground “green” plastic mine.

This week it’s Kevin Czinger of Coda, a Santa Monica-based business that’s bringing a Chinese-made electric sedan that costs $45,000 — half the price of Elon Musk’s electric car for the super-rich — to California.

In DD’s video of Friedman getting pied set to China Toilet Blooz 2.0 , Friedman’s quote about Chinese wonderfulness being another “Sputnik” moment was featured.

Now it’s not Sputniks, but “moon shots.”

Friedman writes:

China is doing moon shots. Yes, that’s plural. When I say “moon shots??? I mean big, multibillion-dollar, 25-year-horizon, game-changing investments.

Naturally, what’s not in this column is that there may not actually be a market for a $45,000 electric sedan, Chinese made, one that goes only 100 miles and requires six hours to charge, in America. Except for dilettantes and the wealthy. (There may, indeed, be a few thousand of those.)

Or that there may be some resistance to the idea of buying a Chinese car, considering the experience Americans already have with faulty products made over there.

There’s a bit more critical piece on the Coda here.

And Friedman naturally does not mention that there are no Chinese-workers making the sedan part who can afford them.

Or that rebates and tax rewards from the US government and the state of California, aimed at providing incentive for buying Codas, outwardly seems to guarantee that a significant portion of the taxpayer money may go to China for the sake of the man’s business venture.

My Tom Friedman Blooz vid.

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