Industria Argentina , Is There Anything That Doesnt Break?

[Matiasba]

But planned obsolesence is for items failing over time, most things I buy in Argentina are just crap from the beginning. And then they wont give your money back , just offer an exchange.

dont they have a warranty? I think everything has a 6 months (if not longer) warranty...

 

[Dublin2BuenosAires]

Agree.



The thing is, that quality industries are always from developed countries that have strong internal markets and dont need an internal demand (thats why they expand and conquer other markets) as this non.competitive industries from the developped world. So if you give these national industries from peripheric countries competition, you ll kill them. In fact, that happened with Argentinas national industries both times the market opened to external products, in neoliberal governments: they dismanteled a lot of industries because they simply couldnt make it with external competition. Competition makes the rich richest and the poor poorer, in other words, concentrates the capital, and that serves to have a more competitive product to go and conquer other markets to concentrate more the capital and like that ad infinitum. So you will always have protectionism with these local and week industries of these countries. So they need to grow and they only have one variable: internal market (they dont export), unlike the big corporations of China, the US, Germany, Japan, etc. It might sound paradoxical, buit to get competitive they have to make poor quality stuff.
And besides, this does not mean that planned obsolesence is out of the first world products, with smart phones, ipods, and a huge etc

Why can't Argentina compete on price and quality exporting to the Lat Am region? Brazil-Chile-Uruguay isn't a big enough market? I'm confused?

Compete on price, and quality taking advantage of the industrial infrastructure and (much vaunted) education and export stuff. Brazil manages to export. Of course, that would require that someone take the unions hand away from the throat of industry.

Unchallenged unions are the eternal handbrake on Argentine competitivity. There is no balance between industry and unions.

Ps. 10 points for the use of your favourite mantra "neo-liberal" ...effectively reduced to meaning nothing at this stage.

 

[johnw100]

Quality it available, you have to pay what it costs.

The problem is that Argentine products can be two or three times more expensive and still poorer quality than elsewhere. Take our longvie oven, it cost the equivelant of £400 and its as basic an oven as Ive ever seen, it doesnt even have a digital display apart from a light on the front to say the grill is on. it would cost £150 in the UK. For the £400 I bought the longvie for I could by a state of the art Bosch ,Neff,etc which will last years.

I think part of the problem is incredibly greedy company owners in Argentina. who push up prices for extra income. For example we bought a kitchen worktop, it was imported from Italy. Its lovely quality and yet it cost half the price of local Argentine worktops which were dated,ugly and inferior quality. We bought it from the importer and the installer liked it so much he decided to sell it through his shop. When a friends enquired a few weeks later he was asking 5 times the price we paid for the same worktop.

Also, I heard that because most of the manufacturing of goods is done in the south of Argentina where wages are low it means that transporting them to the rest of the country is expensive. No rail network means that the lorry drivers rule, and theyre asking crazy money to transport goods , thus pushing up the cost to the consumer.

 

[Matiasba]

Why can't Argentina compete on price and quality exporting to the Lat Am region? Brazil-Chile-Uruguay isn't a big enough market? I'm confused?

Because they have external competition, multinationals from developped countries that are also trying to control those markets.

I put neoliberal because thats what I call the governments imposed by force in Latam proclaiming and practising that model, killing national industries in almost every country.

 

[sleslie23]

Anybody know how to post photos? I'll show you Industria Argentina at it's finest.

 

[fifs2]

On the same vein we briefly flirted with an Argentinean concept of Translated in Argentina, led by the companies already existing here but going nowhere fast when we set up shop in 2003. Needless to say we hastily retreated as we realized the quality implications of associating with mom & pop backroom, undocumented and unregulated disasters peddling this brand. Hello Oracle would you like 10 or 20 mistranslations per cell in DB10? Hello Sony would you like The Last of Us engineered with corrupt characters where accents should appear? Unthinkable for them and us. Quality is a mindset and ethos, and price has nothing to do with it. You can, as Dublin says, compete on price and quality but you must think and espouse quality as your customers do. The material crap that I have bought and chucked in Bsas seems very much connected with the idea of an inexhaustible consumer market whilst a large part of the world focuses on the cheaper concept of win 'em once, brand loyalty.

 

[johnw100]

Anybody know how to post photos? I'll show you Industria Argentina at it's finest.

Go to "More reply options" (bottom right) when you reply . Should be "attach files" option at the bottom

 

[sleslie23]

Viva la Patria!

I used this as my Facebox profile for a while, with the title Industria Argentina. I got all sorts of nasty comments from my pro-K friends. Well, I should say "friends."

 

[scotttswan]

Anybody know how to post photos? I'll show you Industria Argentina at it's finest.

goto www.imgur.com and just drag drop the photos to the webpage, click upload, wait a second or two, then copy the text bellow "BBCode (message boards & forums)" and paste it in your next message.

 

[citygirl]

Sadly my experience is that most things are crap. I had a sweater yesterday that I have worn maybe 10 times. Button fell off. Which is better than the uber expensive dress I tried on once where the buttons (yes plural) actually were falling off while it was on the hanger in the store.

On the positive experiences, I have had good luck with getting furniture made. But that's small artisan places, not mass produced stuff.