Perhaps Im just a little too romantic, but there were times when people toiled hard making everyday goods. No doubt about it that made things like scissors expensive, and when mechanisation offered to make things much cheaper it was celebrated by all but the Luddites. Now its not that a machine is incapable of making a good product, quite the opposite in fact. But with the rapid fall in production costs and a high focus on profit generation suddenly the passion was gone from manufacturing simple things, materials degraded in favour of cheaper alternatives, brittle plastic handles became favourably cheap. And of course if you run a factory that produces a vast amount of a product, its not necessarily in your interest for that product to last. Its not just the manufacturers fault that we have so much shit these days though, very few consumers appreciate quality and are willing (or indeed able) to pay what it costs. This modern system we have is broken and in need of change, it is damaging to the environment as we over produce and dispose of things, and it is also hugely damaging economically. As manufacturing has become more mechanised, it has allowed more profit to be retained by the people high up, and this heavily impacts wealth distribution. As peoples wages havent risen in 30 years, it was only because of cheap goods from overseas and massive lending from banks that things still functioned. In 07 that collapsed. Anyway, watch this video, its kinda heart warming. As it happens I have a pair of Sheffield scissors at work that were left to me by a retired technician, still shit hot scissors.
Posted on: Sun, 14 Dec 2014 09:38:43 +0000
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