Once Upon a Car by Bill Vlasic (Review)

Once Upon a Car by Bill Vlasic

New York, William Morrow, 2011. 

Ho Hum, a business reporter writes about the recent near-death experience of the Big 3 (Ford, GM and Chrysler).  Actually, it is pretty through, flawed because it mostly focused on personalities and executive decisions surrounding the bailout, bankruptcy and reorganization.

My biggest complaint is, there is no real background about the Automobile business in North America.  Even short appendices about the "other" players (Toyota, Honda, etc) would have been very helpful in understanding how we reached that crisis. If you are going to write an industrial survey, please give me an overview of the entire Industry.  If it's about numbers, how about a review of them.

Maybe I am too influenced by my recent viewing of the documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car' (2005);  GM had the technology, and literally threw it away.   Not even a reference to this as a poor strategic decision.

And the numbers behind the "Stranded Costs" of the US Retiree Health Care that (allegedly) dragged them under.

Wal Mart Sales

Were up a bit this quarter (Same Store Sales);  But the rest of the retail landscape is looking weak, Penney's and Sears are "Dead Men Walking" as far as I can tell.

Interesting article in the Wall Street Journal Friday (8/17/12) about how WalMart is seeing the same kind of "Payday" cycling in it's Foreign stores it already sees here.  Basically, the worlds working stiffs are broke, and have NO bargaining power to gain a bit more pocket money.

Chinese manufacturing

For the last four years I have had a nice little novelty toy item listed as a "Buy it Now" item on ebay;  Averaged about two sales a month at $11.95 each, not to be sneered at.  An extra trip to McDonalds when all is said and done.

BUT, the Importer went out of Stock at the end of May, just when I needed to do a restock.  And while restock was initially promised for the end of this Month (July), has been pushed back to the end of August (at best).  And sales are "seasonal", concentrated in the summer months.

I finally made telephone contact with the product manager, basically he didn't care.  No interest in diversifying the product (It would be nice to have SOMETHING else I could rely on to sell), no interest in holding the Chinese feet to the fire on product appearance or assortment.  Or asking the Chinese (Injection Moulded Plastic- How about new Tools?) to develop new product.  So I'm just kind of hanging in there, waiting for the restock to appear on their website.  With no prospect of "growing" the product line.