Tom Orth
This seems like a healthy attitude. Online sales of things manufactured in
low wage areas of things designed in high wage areas is by no means the end
game for ANY item that we buy, let alone bicycles. We are in a transition
phase. The end state is to return to a pre-industrial, pre-globalization
world...in two key ways;
1) Manufacturing will become so automated, distributed, and cheap (where
manufacturing longer requires massive factories), and transportation costs
will become sufficiently high, that it will no longer make sense to
manufacture things in giant centralized locations. Not only will things be
made locally, but the dream of mass customization will eventually be
realized. The Canyon of the future won't be a standard size, but rather
custom made for you based on some body measurements, including rider weight
and riding style. It will be just a matter of entering the data into the
machine. There will be some big challenges to get there, like raw material
distribution and handling and waste stream management, but it will happen.
2) Wealth will be relatively evenly distributed around the world as a
result of globalization. This doesn't necessarily mean that income
inequality between the rich and the poor will decrease...but rather the
rich and the poor themselves will be relatively evenly distributed across
nation states (if they still exist), and what qualifies as poor will be
more similar from nation state to nation state. This was true
pre-industrialization. You could basically calculate the wealth of a nation
by multiplying the number of people living in that nation by a
wealth/person number that was relatively consistent from one country to the
next. Industrialization led to some countries creating massive amounts of
wealth relative to others. There will still be pockets of relative wealth
and poverty, but it will be more like the difference between NYC and
Alabama than the USA versus Bangladesh.
Not everything will be like pre-industrial society: The future will differ
from the pre-industrial world in one key way; knowledge and access to
knowledge will be more evenly distributed. The diffusion of knowledge and
ideas from origination to the rest of the world will be nearly
instantaneous.
This means that the current model that appears to be winning, and everybody
thinks is "the future", in which someone orders something manufactured in
Asia online and then waits for a planes, trains, and trucks to deliver it
from a warehouse in Memphis or Nevada (and then you spend the next few
weeks feeding the cardboard into your recycling bin and wondering what the
heck to do with all of that styrofoam) is destined to be short lived. Our
descendants will find it amazing that this was ever the case.
On Wed, Jul 25, 2018 at 11:30 AM, Dave Feldman via OBRA
wrote:
> Canyon sells a sound product, certainly no less of a bike than many brands
> we're used to seeing in this country. I'm happy to assemble or repair any
> Canyon that someone brings me. I will do the same thing I would do with
> any other bike line in an assembly--check for the state of the bike after
> shipping, and for any missing, damaged, or defective parts. Remember, this
> filtering is done by any local bike store that is doing a proper
> assembly--we treat 'em as semi-raw material to make sure it's fit for the
> customer's use.
>
> --
> David Feldman
> Feldman's Bicycle Repair
> Vancouver, WA
> 503-998-7249
>
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