If manufacturing in the USA is so difficult, why do German, Japanese and Korean cars get built here? And the QC of cars today is light years ahead of what it was 50 years ago. Short term profit maximization isn't necessarily a good business decision.
My understanding (and I'm sure someone will correct me) is that small electronics (think iPhones) aren't made here because they need to keep the factory going 24/7, and they can't get reliable maintenance people.
Ger
Neither quality issues being built in the US, or the 'difficulty of manufacturing' is the reason that products are made in China. Apple makes the Iphone in China because they can do so cheaply, on a then 600 dollar Iphone (now 1000!), the cost of labor was like 30 bucks, the most expensive part was the phone chipset, that is basically custom made processors. The reason stuff is being made in China and elsewhere offshore are cheap wages, other factors, like regulation, taxes, etc, etc, are pretty much balanced by factors like shipping and not having control over the factories. Even with the increase in wages in China (companies are now moving to now cheaper places, like Vietnam), the workers are not making anywhere near middle class wages, they can't afford the product they are buying and those jobs have no benefits, like vacation time, medical care (China has a national system, but it is a joke), disability and the like. All the other claims fall apart when analyzed (and yes, I have read the actual cases studies out of places like Harvard Business School), it is about cheap labor and labor markets where the workers have little recourse since the government is the not so silent partner of almost every business.
With something like trains, 'our trains', it is such a low volume business that has a need to make a lot of money/unit sold, that it would be impossible to make stuff here and pay what is considered a living wage. Lionel is not a public company, nor was MTH (I don't think Atlas is either), so their figures are unknown, but given the nature of the business, they have to maintain large margins to give the returns the people who own them expect, especially with Lionel being owned by private equity firm(s) over the years. It is possible they may build the components in China and do final assembly here, for example, in that model it might be possible to do it and maintain margins. Another model that might work is if some heavily automated plant here in the US that does contract work could take on the job of building the stuff, such a plant would have relatively few workers, though, but could be flexible, especially if 3D printing manufacturing becomes more robust then it is today (and I am not up on the latest levels of 3D printing).
As far as quality goes, that has almost nothing to do with the workers, the cars produced in US plants for foreign makers for example are at the same level quality as the ones made overseas, the whispered "only buy a toyota made in Japan" is a myth, not born out by stats. Even the US auto industry, that still has its problems, have quality levels that are just a tad below their foreign competitors. Quality is all about process to build a product, it is about how a product is designed and developed a lot more than by who does it. It is in vendor relationships, it is in designing in quality rather than inspecting it in, it is about measuring quality and the cost of quality (ie what it costs when it goes wrong). It also means having control over the whole process from one end to the other, when you outsource it, you lose a lot of what is required. Yeah, companies have SLA's with the offshore manufacturers, but they are about as meaningful as the disclaimers on the back of tickets in terms of getting sued, they mean little, because when you sign on for those manufacturers, you have no leverage, they own the tooling, they control everything. You can suggest improvements, but if all the plant manager cares about it putting out X product a day, it won't matter. Lionel factors this 'cost of quality' into their model (as does every offshore manufacturer), and figures whatever a defective unit costs them, it is factored into the production run..and it isn't exactly like the 1980s, when Roger Smith and GM produced a generation of turkey mobiles, where you had clearly better cars you could buy.
In a nutshell, as a consumer, you basically know that the product you buy may or may not work well, because you don't have much choice if you want the new offering.
