with all the complaints from hamb members who have bought from this outfit and spread the word around nationwide (not including complaints from the people who are not hambers) how can they still be in business. it will catch up to them.
They don't have sales quotas to meet, but do you see an endorsement at the end of a tech story about them? Just add these douchebags to the list of sellers (not mfg'ers) that spend more on advertising then on R&D, QA, etc (Fram, Champion Plug, Quaker State, etc).
Probably never. Money talks My other hobby is coin collecting, rare US stuff. Wanna get buried in rare coins? Pay way too much for cleaned high end circulated stuff sold as uncirc? Overgraded crap? Then pick up a copy of a coin magazine at your local newsstand and choose from any of the multi page advertisers, most are crooks. This is why I am so grateful that I found this place, what I have learned here is priceless. But these types prey on the uneducated masses and it sucks, because it's bad for our hobby.
OK can someone on here educate me? Are the Autoloc door latches branded as "Autoloc". I bought some "Bear Jaw" latches from Speedway and then saw on here that Speedway sells the Autoloc Hoffman stuff. Checked my latches and they're branded Tri-Star. Only Tri-Star stuff I've ever seen has been cheap bubble packed auto stuff made in China for a US company. So what brand are the door latches that 38Chevy454 sells?
Manufacturing in China for offshore consumption allows another form of discounting. I first encountered the essence of the following idea in something John Ruskin wrote in the 19th century: The traditional widget is made of cast iron and is a fairly expensive item. Someone comes along and invents a revolutionary plastic widget that costs half as much but is very nearly as good. It is unanimously hailed in the press as the saviour of the human race, as everyone who struggles to afford a widget can now afford several. Soon everyone is using plastic widgets. You can barely find cast-iron widgets, and if you do insist on them you find yourself paying through the nose for them, as all the old cast-iron widget practices have been lost and the infrastructure dismantled. As soon as the cast-iron widget is practically extinct it may be certain that the price of plastic widgets rises, in real terms, to what the cast-iron widgets used to cost. So, in the absence of competition from cast-iron widgets there is no net gain in affordability - but there is a small net loss in quality. And we might say that that small loss is neither here nor there, until someone comes up with a revolutionary cardboard widget ... The result is that we pay the same price in real terms for stuff that is constantly getting cheaper and nastier. The conditions for this are complex and apt to become political, so I won't go into them; but it illustrates quite well how discounting is ultimately false economy. It is consistent with the observation that cheap food does not alleviate but exascerbates hunger, as it is detrimental to the mechanisms and conditions by which people are capable of producing food for themselves. The same principle applies to subsidized housing: cheaper methods promise much but ultimately prove ineffective. The best antidote to the effects of broad-systemic discounting is the reclamation, that is intrinsic to hot-rodding itself, of technological power. A sustainable economy needs more hot-rodding, not less.
The Jalopy Journal
