[Mr 5 0]

Wal Mart is a Chinese store not Japanese. Check it out Wal-Mart represents over 10% of China's Gross National Product. Cheap is costing us a lot of jobs.

Thanks for that information but I was simply posing a hypothetical situation. Millions of items large and small sitting on American store's shelves are now made in China so that's nothing new or exclusive to Wal-Mart. The reason Wal-Mart succeeds (with it's China-made goods) rests largly on the fact that it's human nature to look for the best price on almost any item. 'Buying American' is a fine sentiment but when it simply means that you pay a lot more for things you buy - thus, reducing your standard of living - to enable a company to offer a better pay and benefit package for it's employees, most sensible people balk - and go to Wal-Mart.

Jobs and the industries that provide them are cyclical. As one section of business - manufacturing - subsides, another takes over. To expect nothing to ever change would be naive. Two economists; Michael Cox and Richard Alms, explained this in the November 7th, 2003 edition of the New York Times. This is a portion of that article, edited for brevity:

While it may seem that little progress is being made on the jobs front, beneath the surface the economy is doing what it's done for decades: orchestrating a relentless and enormous recycling of jobs and workers.

Large-scale upheaval in jobs is part of the economy; the impetus for it comes from technology, changing trading patterns and shifting consumer demand. History tells us that the result will be even more jobs, greater productivity and higher incomes for American workers in general.

New Bureau of Labor Statistics data covering the past decade show that job losses seem as common as sport utility vehicles on the highways. Annual job loss ranged from a low of 27 million in 1993 to a high of 35.4 million in 2001. Even in 2000, when the unemployment rate hit its lowest point of the 1990's expansion, 33 million jobs were eliminated.

The flip side is that, according to the labor bureau's figures, annual job gains ranged from 29.6 million in 1993 to 35.6 million in 1999. Day in and day out, workers quit their jobs or get fired, then move on to new positions. Companies start up, fail, downsize, upsize and fill the vacancies of those who left. It is workers' migration to new and existing jobs that keeps the country from sinking into some Depression-like swamp.

Yes, this disruption can be very hard on some workers who lose their employment and have trouble adapting. But in the larger sense, the turmoil in the labor market is vital to economic progress. A good part of the turnover takes place in a handful of industries, like restaurants and retailing, but to greater or lesser extent the churning grinds on across the board, in bad times and good. Tallies of net jobs lost or gained capture only a fraction of the flux in the job market. As this plays out, most workers end up better off.

Societies grow richer when new products emerge that better meet consumers' needs, and when producers adopt new technologies that reduce costs by making workers more productive. In a dynamic, innovative economy, these forces unleash waves upon waves of change. Some industries and companies prosper while others wither. Some companies find themselves with too many workers while others struggle with too few. A free-enterprise system responds by moving resources — in this case workers — to where they're more valuable.

For example, e-mail, word processors, answering machines and other modern office technologies are cutting jobs for secretaries but increasing the ranks of programmers. The Internet opened jobs for hundreds of thousands of Webmasters, an occupation that didn't exist as recently as 1990. Digital cameras translate to fewer photo clerks.

A century ago, 40 of every 100 Americans worked on farms to feed a nation of 90 million. Today, after one of history's most brutal downsizings, it takes just two agricultural workers out of 100 workers to supply an abundance of food to a nation more than three times as large. Suppose we'd kept 40 percent of our labor on the farm. Absurd, yes, but if we had, we wouldn't have had enough workers to produce the new homes, computers, movies, medicines and the myriad other goods and services of our modern economy.

Likewise, the telecommunications industry employed 421,000 switchboard operators in 1970, when Americans made 9.8 billion long-distance calls. Thanks to advances in switching technology, telecommunications companies have reduced the number of operators to 78,000, but consumers ring up 98 billion calls. Let's face it: Americans are better off with more efficient long-distance service. To handle today's volume of calls with 1970's technology, telephone companies would need 4.2 million operators, or 3 percent of the labor force. Without the productivity gains, a long-distance call would probably cost 40 times what it now does.

Microeconomic failure is not macroeconomic failure. Quite the opposite, "failure" is the way the macro economy transfers resources to where they belong. It is the paradox of progress: a society can't reap the rewards of economic progress without accepting the constant change in work that comes with it. Efforts to soften the blows, by devising policies or laws to preserve jobs or protect industries, will lead to stagnation and decline, the biggest threat to American workers.

Job losses for farm hands and telephone operators came so long ago that they don't sting anymore. Today we see the benefits clearly and forget the costs. That's harder to do in the short term — it rightly distresses us to see newspaper photographs of laid-off industrial workers. But these are the economic forces that raise living standards.

Since 1980, Americans have filed 106 million initial claims for unemployment benefits, each representing a lost job. Facing unemployment and rebuilding a life can be hard on families, but the United States today is better off for allowing it to happen. Even with the net decline in jobs over the past three years, during the past decade total United States employment has risen to 130 million from 91 million since 1980, a net gain of nearly 40 million jobs. Productivity, measured by output per worker, increased a staggering 56.2 percent.

Some people tend to forget this. The almost daily drumbeat of reports and "expert commentary" about a so-called jobless recovery prompts the question, "What's gone wrong with the labor market?"

The surprising answer: nothing.

Job growth will come, as it always has in the past. The economy, meanwhile, is as busy as ever in shifting labor from one use to another to make the country richer and more productive.

Resale value is a market driven phenomena. Market charges what it can get for a product. Reputation is a part of it but not all. Believing that a 1995 Honda SHOULD cost more than a 1995 Tarus is also part of it. Marketing plays a big role.

That's correct but even with the best marketing, if customer's experience over time shows a specific car or model is failure-prone or if it's simply a bore to drive and gets so-so gas mileage, it won't retain it's value no matter how clever the marketing. Resale value is consumer-driven and not simply a result of clever marketing. If a Ford Taurus is bland and boring and has a reputation of developing expensive problems (such as leaky head gaskets on the 3.8 engines), it simply won't hold it's value. If the Honda Accord has fewer problems and gets better gas mileage and is more fun to drive, it will demand a better price upon resale. With cars lasting much longer than they used to, it's not always easy to find an older, high-mileage car that won't be a frustrating money-pit and like it or not, Japanese cars have developed a reputation for durability, thus, they retain their value better. That's not marketing, that's simply consumer demand based on experience. Would you prefer to buy a 1995 Chevy Cavalier with 120,000 miles on it or a Honda Accord or Toyota Camry with the same mileage? Most used car buyers will go for the Japanese car - and knowingly pay more for it. If they DO buy the older Chevy or Ford, it will usually have to be a 'steal'.

I do agree that any car that is maintained carefully and not really abused will last a long time - but the engineering has to be there for that to happen. My 1990 Mustang 5.0 has 124,000 miles on it with very few repairs...it's almost all original...but I've maintained it carefully since I bought it, new. If the engineering was shoddy, it simply would have worn out or otherwise given me problems by now. As I often tell friends: all the oil changes in the world won't change the sloppy tolerances in a poorly-built engine. So while I can agree that marketing is a factor in resale value, to give it too much credit would be a mistake. Once a car or specific model has been around awhile (5 years or so) it develops a reputation. If car has too many problems and it's not exciting or special in any substantial way, it won't hold it's value over time. Of course, I don't believe in buying a new car based solely on it's probable resale value but many people do, and so, the Japanese imports retain their value while many (but not all) domestic models sink. Fact of life and while not always rational, still a fact to be dealt with.