[niteowl77]

The toy industry switched to mainland Chinese production after places like Mexico and Taiwan were not profitable enough, the old Macao and Hong Kong "independent protectorates" being the fig-leaf gateways that lulled people into thinking it was all benign.

There has been a recent trend to having diecast toys made in Indonesia... but in factories set up and run by the - wait for it - Chinese. "Outsourcing the outsourcing," so to speak.

[GingisK]

Too many people fail to understand some very important truths. It has never been the manufacturers who jack up the prices of goods. This is done at the retail outlets like Walmart, Sears, and so on. They sell product at 1000% markup, and continue to demand lower prices from manufacturing. I know this through direct experience at two manufacturers:

Way back in 1976 I went to a Singer Sewing Machine plant in Pickens, South Carolina to babysit a telephone system manufactured by my employer. That factory was making power hand tools for Sears. The comptroller of Singer took me on a factory tour. I spotted a router I owned, and said so to my guide. He asked me how much I paid for it. When I told him I paid $72.00 for it, he exclaimed "Wow! 1000% markup! We sell that to Sears for $7.28". This was long before the massive outsourcing to China.

Around 1996 I was working for a company that made credit card scanners for use with cash registers. Our company had to remove filter capacitors and use poor quality parts in those devices in order to have some profit with each sale. We were supplying them to Walmart, where they dictated their purchase price without regard to the actual manufacturing cost to my company. We made about $1.20 on each unit. We dropped that product, let a French company get screwed instead.

The retail stores earn well above usurious profit levels, every one of them.