No we didn’t. Wal-Mart showed up and undercut competition for years to force everyone else out of business, and then jacked up their prices, buy up the property where the competition was at and jack up the rent so they can’t come back.
Comment on amazon can afford to treat its workers with dignity
tempest@lemmy.ca 1 month agoMaybe they could 50 years ago but they decided then that Walmart was the way to go.
Now all most of them can afford is Walmart
NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world 1 month ago
tempest@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
That’s what they do now (and have done for the last 3 decades but Walmart is a lot older than that and you don’t get to be in that position by accident.
They were sourcing cheap Chinese goods in the early 80s.
its_kim_love@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 month ago
And nothing materially changed between then and now. It’s just as possible now as it was then. They just want you to think it isn’t.
wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 1 month ago
I’d hate to break it to you, but that just isn’t true. Manufacturing capabilities have left the continent. People no longer have the relevant expertise to pass on through apprenticeships. We’d basically be starting from scratch, and with corporate hegemony built on cheap overseas labor to compete with.
That doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be worth doing, but let’s not fool ourselves about the uphill battle that it would be, or the very real possibility that people would just keep using the cheap convenient corporations instead of supporting local fabs
its_kim_love@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 month ago
You’re absolutely right. The word I chose was poor. What I meant was the underlying rules of the material world hasn’t changed. Atoms still act the same way, and all that. It was an exceptionally weird way to make an even weirder point, but yeah.
wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 1 month ago
Alright well when you figure out the precise alloy of steel to optimize a spring for required specs, and the exact forging, quenching, and tempering processes and temperatures to use, as well as the specs for the equipment to extrude the wire and twist it into the right shape with enough precision to be commercially replicable, then we can all use your springs in all the things that we build. Now we just need someone else to build literally every other part.
The thing about a lot of modern technology, is that it’s made with other technology, which in turn requires still more technology. So when manufacturing capabilities disappear from a continent, it’s not so simple to just rebuild them. You need to rebuild the stuff that’s required to build them first.
And you also need technical knowledge, niche skill sets and tooling, and sources of often highly specific materials.
This isn’t meant to sound discouraging, but it’s best to understand the scale of the task from the outset.
krisevol@lemmus.org 1 month ago
The rules absolutely have changed. Distribution networks and data transfer are completely different today than back then.