Quote:
Originally Posted by Future240
I am going to use Walmart for example.
It is a proven fact and common knowledge Walmart gets tv's made with lower quality components to meet their prices. Those tv's are made in the same factory as the other tv's however, they are given different part numbers to show they are in fact not the same product.
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... but that's only one part of the story.
electronics manufacturing has anywhere from 10 to 20+ vendors for the average television or computer, and the prices for some parts vary wildly from the vendor based on the quantity you buy.
most of the tech and consumer goods industry is based off actual inventory cost and sales projections for a time period. after the inventory is flagged as aging, sometimes manufacturers take it back and/or rebrand to sell elsewhere.
Costco is the best example. Most brands sell at Costco not because they want to shaft the consumer, they sell at Costco because this allows them to achieve the volume needed on the manufacturing/purchasing side to meet cost targets, whether it be running the factory production line to be efficient enough, or buying enough components from vendors to reduce the cost.
So using Walmart isn't a good example, because the motivation for selling products at a large volume for cheaper is to reduce cost of production and materials, not outright sourcing from different vendors.
I'm not defending Tomei USA here.. I'm just asking people to ignore the Tomei brand (as a whole) because most of the successful Japanese brands have long outsourced their manufacturing years ago, whether it be to 3rd party vendors or outsourced to cheap labor countries where they have factories.
Greddy exhausts are mostly made in Taiwan (by Remark). HKS are mostly made in Thailand at their subsidiary factory. Blitz has components made overseas and they do a semi-final assembly at their warehouse in Nagoya. It's been this way for a long time, you and I are just too focused on the brand to notice the changes made long ago.
If we want to have a discussion about shady business practices, we can all go to a bar, have drinks, and have discussions about other, bigger brands with way worse business practices than Tomei. Tomei's dirt only is in public because they were stupid enough to change part numbers and Tomei Japan filed a lawsuit in Japan against the Tomei US "office" in Japan.