Barbie, Don’t Blame China
A great article from TreeHugger.com that (in my opinion, accurately) describes the American attempt to use China as a scapegoat for the lack of product quality in some 19 million toys imported and now recalled.
“Poor Barbie is disconsolate as her dream house is emptied and her furniture recalled by Mattel for lead paint remediation. We hope that when she refurnishes she will do it with a bit more style and shop local. She will find it a bit more expensive, but perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to go minimal and try living with less. And don’t go blaming the Chinese for the required makeover; Professor Shih-Fen S. Chen of the Richard Ivey School of Business notes that:
“‘The reality is that U.S. importers have failed to install a quality control system and reject any outsourced product that does not meet the benchmarks. We are not talking about a few random errors in production that escape the eyes of quality control managers, but about a colossal failure of the outsourcing firm that let 19 million pieces of unsafe toys slip into the marketplace.’”
Continued… Barbie, Don’t Blame China (TreeHugger)
September 5th, 2007 at 7:16 pm
You know what they say, “Fool me once, shame on you… fool me 19,000,000 times…”
September 6th, 2007 at 7:34 am
Very poignant comment Matt - unfortunately we have or 19,000,000 idiots in the US that will forget this point and as such we’ll end up continuing to ship our manufacturing overseas. As such we’ll increase our trade deficit, increase our global impact and continue to hurt our own economy.
And all of this for the benefit of the corporate dollar and stock price…