Subject:
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Re: Four sets reviewd, but only one good one, so be warned!
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.reviews, lugnet.dear-lego
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Date:
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Sat, 5 Jan 2008 16:18:35 GMT
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Viewed:
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21441 times
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In lugnet.reviews, John Patterson wrote:
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Perhaps it is due to Flextronics not having the quality control that Lego
did. Why they moved production to Juarez Mexico is beyond me. Perhaps very
cheap labor, less than $2.00 an hour might be the reason. Shades of overseas
clothing sweat houses.
Check the box next time you buy a Lego. “Components made in Denmark,
Austria, Hungary, Mexico and the Czech Republic” John P
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Remember that they were originally planning to move production to China.
Reportedly there were two main considerations with abandoning that idea. The
first was that there was an intense backlash concerning quality issues (which
would only have been heightened given the recent lead scandal). And the second
was that China is nowhere near any of their prime markets. While the US may be
the biggest single consumer-nation, remember that until the advent of LEGO Star
Wars sets in 1999, Germany alone was the top buyer, and they are still unmatched
in terms of per-capita purchasing. Throw in the whole of Europe, and they were
pretty much making parts in the absolute worst part of the world when it came to
transportation logistics. It’s a straight shot from China to the California
coast, so it’s pretty simple for the US to import Chinese products. For Europe,
they’d need to ship them around southern Asia and up through the Suez Canal,
bounce them across the Americas, or send them entirely by land. Now, the Czech
Republic is a growing economy, but it’s still an affordable manufacturing
market, it’s right next door to their primary market (western Europe), and the
quality levels have got to be astronomically higher than what they were dealing
with in China (not to mention the fact that it’s a lot easier to go check up on
things). I’ve yet to hear a single person complain about how the quality is
never going to be the same with production being shifted to the CR.
Now Mexico is typically a gateway economy for the US. Companies who want to
close their US manufacturing plants will shift production there temporarily in
preparation for then moving it on to China (my last landlord got laid off from
Baker Furniture when they consolidated production of $10,000 office desks to
their other plant in a region of the Carolinas that was becoming infamous for
being the last domestic step before many furniture companies opened transitional
plants in Mexico, and then finally moved to China). The thing is, TLG already
had LEGO production set up in China with the Clikits line before they ever set
up shop in Mexio. Now they make nothing there, which suggests that they’re
pulling back from that market entirely, quite possibly permanently.
As for Austria and Hungary, I’d been unaware that they’d started production
there at all until I checked a recent box last month to confirm that they no
longer list China as a country of origin. Hungary I can understand, being that
they’re a recovered ex-Eastern Bloc nation, but Austria?
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