02.25.12
iCounterfeits
This week, an interesting story on counterfeit iKit at the New York Times, obtained walking the New York beat.
Readers may recall DD blog chasing around Chinese counterfeits of American brand name guitars, boldly advertised by the Washington Post in a national campaign tied to AdSense-like streaming ads.
This website disrupted that campaign but in those posts one noticed the US companies had effectively damaged their brand names through past behavior. Some people actually liked the Chinese-made knock-offs, even though they were inferior.
Their is a palpable resentment among them of the American brand, not of its past, but of its present image.
American companies show no loyalty to American labor and customers. So why should anyone show loyalty to them? And perhaps that extends to the market for counterfeits.
If the only way to make a living is by selling knock-offs because so many companies have outsourced manufacturing and helped to collapse economic opportunity, it is reasonable to assume some will try to undermine the state of affairs.
For the New York Times piece, a couple excerpts:
Counterfeiting seems to be on the rise, with thousands of fake iPhones found in seizures in California in 2010 and 2011, said Leander Kahney, editor and publisher of CultofMac.com, a technology news site devoted to Apple. Last summer, a South Carolina woman believed she was buying a new iPad sealed in a FedEx envelope, only to get home and find that it was made of wood. In 2009, an electronic store owner’s video of his examination of a fake iPhone became a cult hit. Most knockoffs are sold over the Internet, with stores like the one in New York far rarer.
Bernie Minoso, a manager at the store Tekserve, worked at Apple’s Fifth Avenue store for more than five years, and had to face many unhappy owners — up to five a day — right after a new product was released. Their new devices would not communicate with the iTunes store.
“We started seeing this nearly perfect iPod with a different operating system inside,??? Mr. Minoso said.
The fakes are believed to come from China. Some are made of real Apple parts stolen from company factories there, but most are wholly produced with separate materials. “It has to be a clean environment??? to make the fakes really work, Mr. Minoso said. “If I were doing it, it would be a dust-free shop.???
Some of the fakes have their fans. “There are some really sophisticated ones coming out of China that some people actually prefer …”
In the case of Apple and American guitar brands — all are known for their fancy iconic goods. All are completely reliant on Chinese labor for their profit streams. You can think of them as leaving the brains of the operation — the generals — in the US, as harvesters of the spoil of selling to the plutocracy and the shoe-shiners (and, boy, from this vantage point the cult of Apple really fits the latter pejorative) in the upper middle class.
Tum-ta-tum-tum…
Made in China — Gibson Les Paul counterfeits.