You've got it all wrong - American consumers don't particularly care about
"buy American". What they do respond to is a well organized marketing
campaign for goods with a strong brand identity (particularly when it is
accompanied by good products at attractive prices) , but the product could
be Japanese (Toyota, Sony) or Swiss (Rolex, Swatch) or whatever. Many of
the great marketing powerhouses were and are American, but increasingly
their manufacturing is done overseas and the only thing "American" about
them is the brand name (as you can see from the Timex gallery , Timex was
doing this as early as the '70s and even before). Again from a watchmaking
POV, Timex was always crap, but they weren't meant to be looked at from a
traditional watchmaking POV - they were never meant to be repaired - the
customers who bring them into your shop just don't understand this (not that
Timex went out of it's way to tell them) but they should have understood
that if you pay $30 for a watch instead of $300, something has got to go
(and that it will never be feasible at modern labor rates to do any sort of
repair beyond the most trivial on a $30 item - even a strap replacment may
cost more than a new watch).
Generally speaking , "the cheapest is the dearest" is good advice - if you
look at lifecycle costs, it's better to pay 10x as much and buy a product
that lasts a lifetime than it is to pay 1/10th for a product that you will
need to replace every 6 months. But often nowadays that advice doesn't hold
in all cases. For things like DVD players, MP3 players, digital cameras &
such, what good is a "lifetime" product if the technology will be obsolete
in 2 or 5 years? If you "overbuy" then you will just end up with something
that begs to be replaced with current technology but you don't have the
heart to do it because the old one still works perfectly and so you live
with the old, while the $29 Chinese DVD player will be doing you a favor
when it breaks because now you'll have a reason to get that Blu-Ray. Not
long ago, I visited my elderly aunt and there in her den was the Grundig
hifi I remember seeing in her house when I was a child in the '60s - it
must have cost a pretty penny then, in a lovely lacquered wood cabinet. It
still worked, though it is monophonic and only plays phonograph records.
She did not buy a "cheap crap" product and what did it get her - a lifetime
product but one that has been laughably out of date for 30 of its 40 years.
So yes, in a way, Timex was one of the pioneers of "built in obsolescence",
for better or for worse. What you have to understand is that the market
chooses this stuff, not the other way 'round - Timex made this stuff because
people bought it, bought a lot of it and that this was a fundamentally
democratic thing - they may be "cheap crap" but they made watches affordable
for the first time to millions of people who could never have scraped
together the $ to buy a jeweled watch even if the jeweled watch is the
better value over the long run (which it really isn't if you have to pay for
a $100 cleaning every 5 years). The whole revolution that Henry Ford
started was the idea of the mass market - that the guys who worked in the
factory would actually be able to afford its products. The European and
British markets were not like this back in the day - the factories made
really high quality stuff, but the bloke in the factory putting together
Rolls Royce motor cars would never be able to afford one of his own. So
that's basically the choice - zillions of products sold for "rice" so the
average Joe can afford them, or really high quality products that are out of
reach for most people, so they do completely without - which is better, a
really bad hifi or no music at all?
Post by Alex W.Post by Frank AdamOn Thu, 7 Feb 2008 15:58:12 -0500, "Jack Denver"
Post by Jack DenverWhile no one individual feature on the Timex was entirely new, the whole
package put together ( the manufacturing method, the sales and marketing
methods and channels (TV advertising, drug and discount stores), etc.) was
new and revolutionary (as indicated by their "take the country by storm"
sales that took off immediately). The American "dollar watches" had all
(AFAIK) been pocket watches -there was no popular "dollar wristwatch".
Even
the original Roskopf watches, though unjeweled, were closer to traditional
watch construction than the Timex which was designed for mass production at
the lowest possible labor cost. However there were other Swiss 1 jewel
writswatch movements of the Roskopf type (e.g. Agon) as seen in the
"character" that were basically the same idea as the Timex, but they never
really had a good marketing channel or a well known brand name associated
with them. Having unique technology is not necessarily the key to success
in business.
Yep, basically that is all what Timex was. Marketing.
It worked mainly in the US. That is what makes/made the US such an
economic power. The sheer amount of people under the same sky gives
companies a great opportunity to "play the game". Get the folks to buy
the ad campaigns, the slogans and the spoons full of added nationalist
flavours, and it's a potential 300 million customers and that's a
great leg up to start off any business with ambitions to go
international.
Try that here in Oz and good luck. A new local company's product
actually has to be good to make it here, because we don't fall for
"Australian made", or the latest try of "Australian owned".
Can you say "RM WIlliams"?
:-(
Go back a bit in history, though, and it becomes clear that the Americans
learned this particular game from the British. We had the biggest
domestic market in the world -- we modestly called it the "Empire". A
century ago, Australians were every bit as prone to buying British as
Americans now buy American. So much so, in fact, that despite a
sufficiently large, wealthy and urbanised population, Australia never did
develop indigenous luxury goods industries; there are no Australian watch
manufacturers past or present, for example, or even a system of Australian
hallmarks for silver and gold. You imported it all from us ....
Post by Frank AdamIt is ironic that Timex is celebrated for the very same thing that the
West hated about Russia, Japan(for a long time anyway) and now China,
warning people off their products being low quality cheap crap made in
the zillions and sold for rice.
Rule #1: It's OK if we do it. We are the good guys, after all....
:-)