Is CZ buying Colt?
- Thread starter S197
- Start date
Colt's successive owners and management administrations and Connecticut's United Auto Workers union labor strangled a good company.
New York and New England (Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont) were once home to America's gun manufacturing.
Gone: Remington, Winchester, Ithaca, Harrington and Richardson, High Standard, etc.
New York and New England (Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont) were once home to America's gun manufacturing.
Gone: Remington, Winchester, Ithaca, Harrington and Richardson, High Standard, etc.
In defense of New Hampshire, it is still home to Sig. Sturm Ruger still has a plant here too.
NH never had a huge firearms manufacturing base.
NH never had a huge firearms manufacturing base.
New England was where they once manufactured everything precision... Starting in town like Randolph and Bethel VT, down the rivers to the Connecticut... then on to Windsor, Springfield, VT, Brattleboro, Greenfield, Ma, Springfield, Ma, then the whole Connecticut Precision valley... and on to the markets in NYC. Which were served by ships, the Erie Canal and, later, the railroads. It all happened in New England.
In 1907, when Ford introduced the Model T... the automobile capital of the United States was Springfield, ma.
New England got killed by unions (socialism), do-gooders (socialism), academics (socialists), greedy politicians (scocialists)... But mostly by Mori-seiki. Okuma. Yazda. Yamazaki.... all the brand names in highest-quality Japanese machining centers that cost 1/3rd of what a USA machine cost. And didn't require a highly-trained (unionized) master machinist to run it. CNC killed everything in New England before they had a chance to react to it. When I graduated HS, many of my classmates were machinists-in-training. They graduated after tech-college/training to zero jobs. The 'class of '83' had 100 percent employment. The class of '85 had zero. And that was in the Reagan boom. The machine tool industry vanished from New England overnight.
If you ever get to New England... the Precision Museum in Windsor, VT is one of the best hidden museums in the country. In a day you can do it and the Springfield Armory about an Hour South of Windsor. Brilliant museums describing the rise (Springfield armory) and the fall (Windsor) of an entire industry in New England.
Now Northern New England is a caricature... a Disney world where rich woke techies and paper-pushers have cottages and live their Gilmore Girls small town fantasies while asking questions like "Are those cows real, or do you bring them in for the summer?" I'm not making that up.
Sirhr
"Precision Museum", you say? Mental note taken for planning my next vacation to NE...
I was talking to one of them about buying a small farm. They asked, "Can you smell the cow droppings?"
Sadly, this is spot on. I've seen my town and county change so much over the last 20 years. It's all people coming up from Mass and then bringing their attitudes with them. NH is holding out, but in another 20 it will be northern mass.
Not sure I agree with all of that. A quality Japanese made CNC machine like Mori-Seiki or Lablond-Makino at the time wasn't cheap by any stretch of the imagination. However, a Lablond-Makino would run circles around a Cincinnati Millicron from the standpoint of ease of use. FANUC was probably more instrumental in wiping out the US market than anyone else. The US machine manufacturers insisted on using their proprietary controls and systems, which made training people more difficult.
The US manufacturers had the opportunity to see the future and run with it and they stuck their head in the sand and did nothing to compete for a decade or more. HAAS finally stepped in and did what the big boys should have been doing all along.
Can't really blame this on the Japanese for producing a superior product and leaving that unanswered for decades. I'll take a Makino over a Cincinnati any day of the week.
Sears was Amazon before there was an Amazon. You could order anything from the catalog, including build it yourself houses. They had the distribution channels, the customer lists, everything to carry that on into the internet era. But they failed to see the future and tossed it all away.
This is what happens when all you focus on is next quarters stock price and dividend.
We are on the same page and I definitely won't dispute the names... I used the ones I remembered as examples.
And the Japanese machines were not cheap. But their total cost of ownership made them a bargain. Buy once, cry once as we like to say around here. A big investment... but each machining center could get rid of a lathe operator, a mill operator, grinder operator.... on two to three shifts, depending on how hard you ran the machine. At the salaries that senior, experienced master union machinists were making at the time... those CNC/tape machines paid for themselves in no time. While allowing more flexibility and faster re-tooling, etc.
The U.S. had every chance to whoop the Japanese. And keep manufacturing. But I also remember hearing from folks that they would strike plants for bringing in CNC machines. Machines got smashed or tipped off trucks at the behest of union bosses. Instead of embracing the technology and helping to bring it forward while protecting their industries and jobs, they stuck their fingers in the eyes of management, shareholders and burned it all to the ground. Same thing the losers who want McDonalds workers making $35 an hour are doing. Guaranteeing that millions of jobs will be handled by robots... by being idiotic socialists and SJW's.
Yup, the Japanese just made a better product. It was the unions and the social justice warriors and the sheep who followed their commands blindly who put the jobs and the industries on the busses to Mexico's Maquiladoras. Then on the boats to China.
Cheers,
Sirhr
Colt has been a F'ed up company from the git-go. Depending on .gov contracts and only grudgingly selling to the civillian market. They have had multiple bankruptcies over the years.
Hell they got beat out by a foreign company (FN) to make their own rifles (M16/M4) for the US Military.
Sears started down the path to destruction when they turned away from what they were good at, selling good serviceable products cheap. They tried to be Macys and had no idea how to sell white collar product to a blue collar customer base.
I mean, they're about to pass a second amendment, for the right to keep arms for self defense. Can't be all bad.
This is the exact same premise why I won't use any of the 'self-checkouts' at the huge amount of stores that have them nowadays. The more the sheeple use them, the less "people" are going to be employed. Entry level market jobs, such as McDonalds, the local grocery store, hardware store.... are just that. ENTRY LEVEL. Untrained. LOW PAY. But they're jobs, for youngsters to learn what it is to be working.
If that is all they want to aspire to in life, then they can simply see what they have to look forward to. But for others, to use that experience as a building block and then pursue further education/training, they'll have a better grasp on the intent AND the outcome.
30 years ago, there were a LOT More people working in the banking industry, too. Not just the 'front-line tellers', but the whole infrastructure behind them. In so many different locations. The more people simply use credit and 'automatic payments' the less human beings are needed because of computers.
All I'm saying is, the 'entry level' jobs are needed, and we gotta keep 'em in existence, for EVERYONE'S kids to have some place to start out.
There's very little market for untrained/inexperienced CEO's out there.
Most persons I know from former eastern block countries are very anti-big government and anti-communist. They are way ahead of many Americans as they can easily see through the hypocrisy, as having lived under the thumb of communism. They would never buy the lies our own propaganda machine is pushing.
