Quote:
Originally Posted by Eric
If you think about it, importing stuff that you have in abundance is never "cheaper" ...
|
We used to make more cars than anywhere else but the USA-they were built by British owned companies. British Leyland was the UKs biggest exporter by far.
They were badly designed, very badly built, unreliable and not cheap. I should know, I had to run quite a lot of them. Also you could guarantee that at any time you looked one of the BL factories had a strike on.
Result- people with a choice bought foreign(Japanese mainly at first) which were the opposite of everything above.
The French bought French, the Italians Italian, the Germans German. We bought
anything reliable- all imports. The home market collapsed along with exports.
We now export about a million cars a year but they're all built by foreign owned companies-they're good, but we had to get the Japanese to show us how to do it(canban etc) and to re-educate and re-train our workers who can now compete with anywhere in the world for quality and productivity. And they're happy bunnies doing it.
Not importing when you have plenty of your own product- not always so simple a decision.