There was a thread about Starrett squares recently that prompted a discussion about their products being made in the USA vs the revelation that some are made in (gasp) China. The assumption being that a product being made in the USA is good and a product being made in China would be junk.
Is this an accurate assumption, or just a widely held but not necessarily true bias?
I have heard comments from manufacturers that the quality that comes from their Chinese subcontractors is mostly a function of the quality control, supervision and enforcement of standards from the manufacturer themselves. Some are very vigilant about it and others are not.
The equation could go the other way also, where a USA manufacturer could have very low standards and still get the "benefit" of a positive bias that goes with being made in USA yet still sell junk.
When I was growing up, there was a deeply held perception that anything made in the USA, Germany, UK would be very high quality and almost everything else was inferior. In fact, in the 70's anything Japanese was considered to be junk, and then some time in the 80's it changed and all of a sudden Japanese made became a symbol of high quality.
So what's the point? Maybe making a good purchase decision requires looking past the country of manufacturer.
I also wonder whether more and more products are made by robotics and computer controlled machines. If they are set up and designed well at the front end, the human factor is much lower and less directly impactful than it would have been traditionally, so what difference would it make where the machinery is operating in terms of the quality of the end product? Maybe the manufacturing process is more portable than ever before, which also undermines biases associated with country of manufacture.
Not intending this to be a political post. I'm just saying that country of manufacture is a data point, but maybe not the decisive data point it once was.