04.14.12
Presto Hot Dogger — replaced by arms manufacturing
The last post on ‘Old pink meat product‘ produced a comments section identifying the electrocuting hot dog cooker as the Presto Hot Dogger. YouTube had a few home videos devoted to the Presto as retro cooking equipment. Unbreakable and manufactured, originally, as early as the Fifties in Eau Claire, WI, here’s one amusing video.
With a touch of extra amusement provided by the Carolina Chocolate Drops singing “Short Life of Trouble.”
I used the Hot Dogger in the late Eighties and early Nineties. It was a thing that, fundamentally, always worked. Unlike the current service-centered economy, as you know if you have standard Internet connectivity through AT&T, or have recently dumped cable because having no tv other than DVD replay is actually better.
Presto made home appliances. And you know what happened. It was all moved to China.
Here’s a piece from the BBC on US manufacturing, from 2002:
Maryjo Cohen is shutting two factories.
Cheap, high quality goods from China have eaten away profit margins at National Presto industries, a Wisconsin-based firm which makes pressure cookers and electric frying pans.
“That’s going on all over the US, our entire industry has moved to China,” says Ms Cohen, National Presto’s president.
She is reluctant to say how many jobs will go at National Presto’s plants in New Mexico and Mississippi but it will be a “substantial number for a company our size” – at least half the workforce.
National Presto has an agent in Hong Kong who subcontracts work to plants in China’s neighbouring Guangdong province.
How did National Presto diversify and expand after outsourcing its small cooking appliance manufacturing? You read this blog, you already have a hunch.
Once again, a perfect example of national decline.
National Presto went into arms manufacturing, the only protected business and preserved-at-all-costs labor in the United States.
The company makes over 600 million a year in ammo and ordnance production through a subsidiary.
From the Milwaukee newspaper, a few days ago:
National Presto Industries Inc. said Monday its ammunition products unit has received an $81 million defense contract option from the U.S. Army.
The Eau Claire-based company said AMTEC Corp., a wholly owned subsidiary, received the option award under AMTEC’s five-year contract to produce 40 mm systems for the Army. It is the first award AMTEC has received during the government’s 2012 fiscal year, which ends in September, and additional awards are anticipated, the company said.
The option award brings the cumulative amount awarded under an ongoing 40 mm contract to $364.7 million, the company said.
A business profile at Seeking Alpha comments, “National Presto Industries (NPK) is an oddly diversified producer of military arms, adult diapers, and small cooking appliances with a market capitalization of well under $1 billion.”
Up until a few years ago the received wisdom, also delivered by economists, was that it was fine to deindustrialize and ship most domestic non-military manufacturing to China and other periperal nations with cheap labor markets.
You didn’t have to make things in America anymore. You could be good at other stuff — like financial products and software programming.
Add arms manufacturing.
Life ain’t fair. But even the bromide, the preservation of arms manufacturing and the consequent decade of continuous war has been profoundly unfair to the 99 percent in this country.
If arms manufacturing had been exposed to the same pressure as all other forms of domestic manufacturing, we wouldn’t have war.
A black comedy could be written around a script in which a national leader decides to enact policies that would mandate absolute lowest bid contracts on arms manufacturing to a global marketplace. Yes, I know it could never happen.
But a story revolving around the fear, loathing and comeuppance in the military defense industry complex upon dislocation into the Chinese manufacturing sector is enjoyable to consider. I’d buy that novel. I’d anticipate it being optioned to Hollywood. I’d be first in line for the the movie adaptation, too.
I’d love the parts where the dispirited newly fired workers of Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin were taught how to apply for food stamps at severance meetings. And, how, with a lot of extra free time on their hands they fruitlessly strived to make a go of things by fashioning their own personal brands, uploading homemade white rap and comedy videos to YouTube. Or making small business website pages advertising new artisan coffee or dog walking businesses. Logging on to Zaarly everyday to find new opportunities as personal assistants or gofers for the more fortunate, locally.
Going back to school to learn how to be a chef at the Cordon Bleu school; taking two or three janitorial positions, any job that couldn’t be sent to hired hands overseas. Wait staff, not so favorable an outlook, because of something else, made by another in the army of pitiless trivial douchebags from the creative economic destruction industry, coincidentally called the Presto.
There would be growth in the cyberdefense subsidiary businesses of the big arms companies because, paradoxically, while all the manufacturing had been shipped to China, Chinese state-supported hackers were still penetrating US networks. However, growth would slow as even the Chinese began to realize there was little left to steal in the way of so-called intellectual property. And getting into the power grid just wasn’t important when you had that country’s
production completely by the balls.
Yes, there should be equalization and fair dinkum payback! And no, it won’t happen but that doesn’t mean you can’t savor the idea. China is getting into the aircraft carrier business, I hear. And certainly it has a military space program.
Think of all the money that could be saved on ammo and bombs.
If the Chinese can make electric guitars for Fender and Gibson, and all the digital underpinnings that go into the modern consumer electronics music industry, surely it can produce Joint Direct Attack Munitions and Predator drones through licensing agreements.
Shock! Horror!
It’s nice to dream about it all being gone. Like the Presto Hot Dogger.
