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Date:         Wed, 13 Jul 2005 16:21:01 -0400
Reply-To:     The Bus Depot <vanagon@BUSDEPOT.COM>
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From:         The Bus Depot <vanagon@BUSDEPOT.COM>
Subject:      Re: Stainless Steel Coolant Lines Now Available!
Comments: cc: THX0001@AOL.COM
In-Reply-To:  <19c.3743e5c2.3006ae13@aol.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

George Goff said:

> I was real keen on the idea of replacing those doomed-to-fail > coolant lines with stainless until I read the disclaimer which noted: > > "Country (if noted) is the country in which the manufacturer > is based. Because many companies now have factories > worldwide, the actual part could be made elsewhere." > > No one cares if the corporate offices of a vendor > (manufacturer) is in Bumfuck, China, but we ALL > care if the factory is located there.

First of all, in reference to the coolant lines, the asterisked note that you quoted from does not apply to them. That note only applies if a country is listed with an asterisk next to it, just below the part number listing on the product page. It does not apply to a product such as this one, where I actually say it's German right in the description. I imported these from Germany myself and have dealt with the supplier for many years. They are German.

As for your point in general, in a perfect world I would agree completely. I'd love to be able to accurately specify actual country of manufacture on the website for every product. But increasingly over the last few years that has become impossible, with just about every major company going multinational. (Even VW/Germany is now shipping products sourced from Brazil, Mexico, etc.) It's gotten to the point that country of origin can change weekly, or even faster. I've even received a single pallet of the identical part number and found three different countries of manufacture on one pallet! Multiply this by a couple hundred thousand products, and you can see that keeping country of manufacture info current would be a full-time job in and of itself.

At the same time, many shoppers do want to know if the listed brand is sourced from Germany, China, Mexico, etc. Even though these days that may no longer guarantee that the part is actually produced there, it can still be useful information. If you buy a ball joint sourced from Lemforder/Germany, it is extremely likely to be German made, and is certainly German engineered. If you buy one sourced from Varga, who is Brazilian, it is almost certainly a Brazilian part. (Not that all German products are necessarily better anyway, but that's a different issue.) So this information can be helpful to those who care about such things, even if admittedly incomplete. At the same time, I felt it necessary to clarify that this doesn't always assure country of origin (albeit a bit more succinctly than I have here). This is why I wrote the explanation that you quoted. I know that people have a distaste for "disclaimers," but the note's intent really is to inform, not deceive. That's why I put it right at the bottom of every single product page on the website - not on a separate "fine print" page that nobody reads, like those "user license agreements" for computer software.

As manufacturing globalization continues to develop, all parts vendors are wrestling with this same problem, and I'm sure various solutions will develop over time. Some are delaying the inevitable and still listing countries of origin that are hopelessly outdated (a head-in-the-sand approach, if you ask me, as this globalization trend will not go away). And, unfortunately, a few are taking the opportunity to deceive. A couple have started using phrases like "German quality" on products that never were German made. And one has even gone as far as to trademark a brand name with the word Germany right in the name - for use on their Chinese-made parts!

- Ron Salmon The Bus Depot, Inc. www.busdepot.com (215) 234-VWVW

_____________________________________________ Toll-Free for Orders by PART # : 1-866-BUS-DEPOT


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