12.06.10
Made In China: Guitar Center continued
Over the Thanksgiving holiday, DD and drummer went to Guitar Center to pick up some things in preparation for the big show this Sunday.
It rammed home again how the US business model has converted to plutonomy.
And not for the betterment of any regular workers like the poor guys and gals jobbing the registers for minimal payment at Guitar Center.
At Guitar Center you have a place where everything for sale in it was either invented by Americans or the British. All of the history in hardware of classic rock is on sale. The sound heard round the world.
And virtually everything classic rock in the front of the store — all the stuff being peddled for the holiday season and not behind the glass doors in the back of the place, or hung up so high on the wall you have to get a sales associate to look at it … is made in China.
Not just a few things. Everything.
Everybody took their manufacturing business to China. US firms mercilessly downsized their labor, in the process transforming domestic ‘factories,’ what’s left of them, to small artisan shops making guitars and amplifiers for bankers, lawyers, doctors and other rich people who want to hang Stratocasters and Les Pauls on their walls as investments/sops to impress repulsive friends.
So the real American-made stuff is back in the glass room. Where the more senior employees can carefully watch over it and the unwealthy riffraff discouraged from handling the merchandise.
This, of course, includes most of the employees, too. Since their wages have been kept stagnant they can neither afford the US stuff nor the rate of interest on any credit that might be extended to them.
Like so many businesses, Guitar Center has collaborated in the beggaring of the American consumer. As a consequence, like the rock instrumentation industry, it has split in half — one section for catering to the wealthy, the other — where the vast weight of materiele is — to the vanishing middle class. And, of course, parents looking for something for junior’s annoying hobby this holiday.
One of these front of the store great gift idea, seen right by the cash register, on Black Friday was the Made-In-China authentic “Piedmont Blues” harmonica set!
Twenty bucks for seven harmonicas and a case, shipped from China.
Here’s a rhetorical question.
Since the amount of energy needed to make harmonicas is the same wherever you are in the world, due to the laws of thermodynamics as they apply to manufacturing, what possible benefit is their to make them in China — in terms of a green policy — and then to mass ship them across the Pacific? As opposed to making them closer to home?
As said — rhetorical.
The Piedmont Blues set is ostensibly a Hohner product, the famous German company, also forced to make a relatively cheap instrument even cheaper.
You can, for instance, have Hohner Pro or Marine Band harps which were always acceptable and are still relatively inexpensive
Or if you’ve really been beggared, as so many have, there’s the Piedmont Blues set. You could give up two or three lunches in a week for it.
I mentioned the name “Piedmont Blues” as applied to a Chinese-made instrument with my friend Don, over an afternoon of football the same weekend.
We both had a good laugh. Almost as good as the one reserved for the ludicrous nature of the old Mojo Deluxe Blues & Rock Harmonica. Which was probably made in the same plant and with the same machines as the ‘Piedmont Blues’ harmonicas.
Replaced by the Piedmont Blues.
Over the weekend, the absentee president hailed a trade deal with South Korea.
South Korea is where the American rock instrument industry took some manufacturing for items somewhat less pricey that its domestically made product. It filled the niche Japan used to about twenty years ago, before labor in that country made its rock instruments into premium buys.
It is where DD’s Epiphone Les Paul Ultra II was made, a mid-priced instrument which I would have been able to buy, at some point, in the US when I was in the Highway Kings. Now most Gibsons are prohibitively expensive artisan plutonomy pieces.
So jobs were outsourced to South Korea. Whose people, incidentally, now enjoy a better tech infrastructure than the United States.
Krugman assessed Obama’s treaty this way:
One thing I’m hearing, now that all hope of useful fiscal policy is gone, is the idea that trade can be a driver of recovery — that stuff like the South Korea trade agreement can serve as a form of macro policy.
Um, no.
Our macro problem is insufficient spending on U.S.-produced goods and services; this spending is defined by
Y = C + I + G + X – M
where C is consumer spending, I investment spending, G government purchases of goods and services, X is exports, and M is imports. Trade agreements raise X — but they also lead to higher M. On average, they’re a wash.
“And there’s even an argument to the effect that increased trade reduces US employment in the current context; if the jobs we gain are higher value-added per worker, while those we lose are lower value-added, and spending stays the same, that means the same GDP but fewer jobs,” he adds.
South Korea, as it pertained to Epiphone, the low-price brand Gibson subsidiary, meant lost jobs in the US. For less value added jobs at places like Guitar Center here.
Since then, Gibson took a lot of Epiphone manufacturing to China downsizing South Korean labor for cheaper sources. Well, now some of them have probably been working at the national equivalent of Guitar Center, too.