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As the thread proves, there are many sides to the story. Chris makes the good point about where you do most of your shopping. 20 years ago in our small town, most people, as they had for years, bought their groceries, their medicine, their hardware, cars & trucks, and yes, tv sets, here in town. The big-boxes were not yet convenient and so there was little reason to go to another town to go shopping since you could get everything here. One by one the small mom & pops closed because it was too easy to shop elsewhere. For one thing, hardly anybody works here anymore. It is now a bedroom community. It was heartbreaking to watch the local grocery store go out of business. Years ago you would go in there and they would have 2 or 3 checkout lanes open, 3 or 4 people deep, with carts loaded. In later years, after big new supermarkets had opened 10 minutes away in all directions, you would go in there and find one register open, and nobody ever had a cart full. This pushed them into a downward spiral as they could not afford to keep the shelves full, which turned away shoppers who couldn't find what they needed. I went in there the day they closed and tried to fill a basket with stuff just to help them out. There wasn't enough left to do it.
Well, I guess I'm straying too much here...Americans have never been good at buying American when American stuff cost more. (not in modern times, anyway) We gripe about plants closing but I would say a very tiny percentage of people pay attention to where something is made. Sometimes it takes quite a lot of effort to buy American...you may have to stop in every store in town. I have done such searches in the past for things like an electric can opener, a waffle iron, a telephone, a camera. The telephone was frustrating as the website said they were made in Mississippi but the one I got came from China. The camera? That was in the mid-90s and I must have looked at 100 cheap cameras to find that Keystone, on the shelf at a small Woolworths.
The consumer electronics industry has been through many cycles over the years. There was the telephone, the phonograph, the radio...in each case there were a few pioneers, then hundreds or thousands of companies popped up. The market culled out those with an inferior product, or poor business plans. Starting with radio, as time went on the market got saturated. After a time everyone had at least one radio so to stay in business you either had to convince them to buy something better as a replacement or sell them a second set. By the 40s the radio business might have collapsed down to only 3 or 4 makers but then along came television. A television was like a high-end radio and was an excellent profit maker. And they sold like hotcakes. TV was a shot in the arm for most radio makers, and many new companies jumped on the bandwagon. But by the mid/late 50s everyone who was going to have a TV had one. Again, the makers had to either offer up something new (bigger screens, modern styling, portables) or go out of business. The TV business started to suffer. Color TV would be the savior, but it would take some time to come. Many companies left the business. When color did become serious in the mid 60s it was, again, a shot in the arm for those who had managed to hang on. Eventually, though, the market was again saturated-there was almost nobody else left to sell a first color tv to. So, what was new and exciting? Solid state? Yeah, that brought a few sales. Modular chassis were not enough by themselves. Modern remote control sold some sets. But mostly the market needed to find "the next big thing". RCA thought it would be the CED. Zenith put a lot of effort into early HDTV, as I recall, but it ran out of steam. I think if HDTV had come along in the 80s it would have helped RCA/Zenith/GE/NAP continue to be real players for another decade. Instead they were just in the business of selling a commodity, something no more exciting or "new" than a can opener or a waffle iron or a cheap camera. By the time the technology was ready the American consumer electronics giants were all washed up. I remember that back in the 80s the owner of the local TV shop said that someday we would have flat tv sets that hung on the wall and sattelite dishes the size of serving plates. Well, he was exactly right. It just took too long to happen to save his business or the industry.
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Bryan
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