Glimpse of Our Future?
March 27th, 2010Look What Happened in Two Years
Here I present more evidence that the Chinese are going to eat our lunch.
I have been cooking in my church’s kitchen. Like most kitchens, this kitchen contains no decent knives. The other day, I took my cheap Chinese cleaver up there to slice pizza toppings. I decided to get a cleaver for them to keep.
I ordered my cleaver a few years back, from The Wok Shop. I probably paid ten bucks. That’s what they charge now. It’s carbon steel, which means it rusts. It sharpens up like a razor in less than a minute. It holds an edge a good long time. It minces garlic better than any American or European kitchen knife. You can scrape stuff with the end. It will cut onions in slices as thin as a business card. You can carry chopped food on the side of it. You can tenderize meat with the dull side. Don’t get me started. It’s a miracle knife.
I placed a new Wok Shop order. Today the new cleavers arrived. I got one just like mine for church, plus a meat cleaver and a smaller (supposedly) vegetable cleaver for myself. All three knives were sharp when they arrived. Two were sharp enough to shave with.
Here’s a photo.
My old cleaver is the one on the left. Notice the crappy workmanship. There are lots of odd dings in the steel. The weird bands of oxidation are irregular, too. It works great, but the workmanship screams “CHINA.”
Now look at the pretty cleaver next to it. The stamped characters are done much better. The bands are even. They’ve made curves on the edge and back. There are no dings in the metal. It looks sort of polished. It’s like the two cleavers came from different planets.
Now, maybe the Wok Shop found a new supplier, and nothing has happened in China. But I don’t think that’s what happened. Chinese goods are getting better, across the board. If you buy tools, you already know this. My old cleaver just turned three, and it’s nothing like the one I just bought.
Incidentally, a lot of people get excited about Chan Chi Kee cleavers. I wouldn’t put much faith in them without trying one first. Back when I got my cleaver, very few people had heard of Chan Chi Kee. Nuts on knife boards were starting to talk about them. They got a lot of publicity over the web over the last couple of years. Now people act like Chan Chi Kee is the gold standard. Maybe it is. I don’t have one, so I can’t tell you if they’re the best Chinese cleavers. I very much doubt it. In China, commodity goods like this typically come from very similar factories, and they tend to be of pretty uniform quality. And Chan Chi Kee cleavers were cheaper before people started asking for them. Maybe there is a physical reason why they cost more now, but I suspect the main reason is PR.
I don’t see how a Chan Chi Kee could be any better than the one I just bought, or my old cleaver. I don’t think the Chinese are lying awake nights, reinventing carbon steel.
Oh. This is disturbing. My old cleaver cost twice as much as the new one. I just looked it up. Same product, better workmanship, half the cost.
Some day, little American kids will think we’re lying when we tell them unskilled union workers used to get $75 an hour. The Chinese will see to that. Some people claim the Chinese will eventually have to charge more for their labor. Sure, when they find jobs for 1.5 (or whatever it is) billion hungry people. Until then, my bet is on the law of supply and demand. And if the Chinese multiplied their average wage by ten, they’d still beat our butts.
Then there’s India.
I plan to enjoy the great cheap tools until I have to go live in a government-subsidized hole.
Correction
Turns out the heavy cleaver on the right is Taiwanese. Their labor rate is 8 times China’s, according to the owner of Grizzly Industrial, yet they managed to supply a very nice heavy cleaver which retails for $20. I assume, then, that a Chinese job would be considerably cheaper.
March 27th, 2010 at 4:21 PM
The Chinese are building more and more of the electronics we sell and service. The quality is improving with every new generation that comes out. The only stuff that don’t work is when somebody over here forces them to make something “green”. “Green” circuit bd’s fail as soon as they get warm or so it seems.
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No movement on the home front, thanks for the prayers and kind thoughts.
March 27th, 2010 at 5:51 PM
China is starting to figure out the secret of steel but the workmanship is really not much better.
The Taiwanese Cleaver is clearly better made than the Chinese cleavers, especially the cleaver second in from the right which looks like it was made in a medieval blacksmith shop by folks with really tiny hands!
I’m going to stick with my trusty Victorinox 10″ chef knife.
March 27th, 2010 at 9:09 PM
The Chinese cleaver is actually much prettier than the Taiwan job, and the workmanship is a thousand times as good as the workmanship on my old cleaver. You just can’t see all the flaws through the rust and stains.
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The cleaver you really hate cost $6.00, and it’s nothing like as nice as the black one. Still, the workmanship is much better than my old cleaver, which looks like something I hammered out of a piece of an old Ford.
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The new black cleaver is wonderful. Totally superior to my Shun. Balanced. Just the right thickness. Easy to sharpen. I’m jealous of my church.
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I assume your Victorinox is the same as my Forschner, since the Forschner says “Victorinox” on the blade. If so, it’s an amazing knife at a great price.
March 28th, 2010 at 11:38 AM
Steve, which # is the black cleaver on the Wok Store site? #2 or #3??
I’d like to order two of those.
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They need a bit of help getting some better pictures there.
March 28th, 2010 at 4:48 PM
The one you want is “vegetable cleaver.”
March 28th, 2010 at 5:33 PM
Buy American and support our country and our economy and the people that support your lifestyle. I will gladly pay extra for quality American built goods. If china had the same cost of living, had to build there factories to meet EPA standards, had to meet OSHA standards and gave there people the same benefits we enjoy in our country then there costs would be more expensive then ours because of the shipping it over here expenses.
REMEMBER BUY AMERICAN AND SUPPORT THE COUNTRY THAT SUPPORTS YOU.
March 28th, 2010 at 8:08 PM
Easier to take seriously when the money isn’t going to unskilled laborers who make more money than lawyers AND who have pensions and benefits. Biggest offender: the UAW, an organization founded by self-proclaimed socialists.
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Another thing to keep in mind: often, the choice isn’t between Chinese and American. It’s between Chinese and not being able to afford it. If I had had to buy a new American milling machine, there is no way I would have spent the money. And buying a used American machine would not have supported American workers. That only happens when you buy new.
March 28th, 2010 at 8:51 PM
Actually, buying used, in some cases, increases the resale value of the brand, not the item, purchased. This increases the marketability of the brand.
March 28th, 2010 at 10:51 PM
Support Capitalism and the free market-place.
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Be a good steward of God’s blessings, get the best value for the money.
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March 28th, 2010 at 10:57 PM
Not that this apropos of Middle Kingdom cleavers but it does put me in mind of a knife I bought back while I was in collitch. Sophomore year I was living in a Uni apartment instead of a dorm room and so was doing most of my own cooking. I had no decent knife and just bought one that was hanging on the aisle in the local Kroger, I want to say “Old Hickory” was the brand but that might be quite right.
It was a mild steel that would stain but could be scrubbed with Bartender’s Friend or Zud and clean up. It would take a beautiful edge but it would hold for about one session of use. It was a classic chef’s knife shape and I’ve used that knife ever since, over 30 years now.
Even my knife-loving mother “appropriated” it for her use for a bunch of those years.
I’ve got a lot of other knives since then (and just ordered a Shun Pro 300mm yanagiba from Woot) but that old hunk of metal still has a claim on my affection that any number of more spendy cutters can’t break.
Every one of those cleavers looks beautiful to me.
March 28th, 2010 at 11:55 PM
Your old cleaver looks just like mine! And the one next to it is very pretty, yes.
March 29th, 2010 at 1:29 AM
Just to clear things up.
I am ex UAW, journeyman machinist, and I never made as much as a good lawyer, maybe a decent Paralegal, but not a good lawyer.
The socialists weren’t able to save my job either and now so many skilled people are out of work in my area and hungry, the companies that are hiring are offering starting wages that are an insult to skilled labor.
My job and many others were replaced by non-union contract workers who in many cases earn as much as I did without the union B.S., a good thing in a lot of instances but once you wear the Union label you are pretty well branded as a subversive and these companies have filled their employee quotas long ago anyway.
So, in short order, we were replaced and can’t get back in even if we want to.
Where are the lawyer pay level skilled labor jobs? I may consider ditching the farm and moving,,,,
March 29th, 2010 at 9:44 AM
The stuff from Japan was – at one time – synomymous with garbage (low quality, shoddy stuff). Those Asian countires improve their quality rapidly once they get going on things.
Japan & Korea got to making good cars fairly quickly.
Theer seem to be a lot of things that US companies don’t make anymore – I often don’t see US made options for some things I buy.
March 29th, 2010 at 9:58 AM
People have grossly exaggerated notions of what lawyers earn. Lawyers often graduate with six figures in debt, and many end up with jobs paying around $30,000 per year, with low or no benefits, and no pension plans. Auto workers come in at around $130,000 per year, including pensions and benefits. And if you can breathe, you are qualified to be an auto worker. No education needed; no student loans involved.
March 29th, 2010 at 10:03 AM
“Actually, buying used, in some cases, increases the resale value of the brand, not the item, purchased.”
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I don’t think increasing the resale value of a brand does a whole lot for the people on the assembly line. Certainly not enough to justify home hobbyists paying $16,000 for Bridgeport machines instead of $5000 for better-quality Asian items.
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The unions wanted unjustified compensation in the present, at the expense of the future. They got it. Now the future has arrived, and the bill has to be paid.
March 29th, 2010 at 12:31 PM
“…had to build there factories to meet EPA standards, had to meet OSHA standards…”
Don’t you see that as the problem?
When you keep on piling on rules and regulations, it becomes more and more expensive to do business in the US.
March 29th, 2010 at 9:20 PM
There’s a popular brand of kitchen knife in Taiwan call Kinmen (Golden Gate). Back in the ’50s, Chinese Communists basically fired a couple of months against the outlining island held by the Nationalist. The island defense held, and there’s enough shell fired that they managed to make kitchen knife out of those shells for a couple of decades.
March 29th, 2010 at 9:40 PM
correction. Maestro Wu is still making kitchen knife from those shells.
March 30th, 2010 at 8:31 AM
ErikZ: It’s hard to fault safety and environmental regulations in industry here. But if we were serious about it, we would not forbid tariffs on offshore competition that does not meet the same standards.
I’m a capitalist (others may not agree because I don’t attain to their standards) but not free trade. With free trade you get cheaper machine tools, underwear, etc, but you lose jobs, and a degree of national security (self reliance). National standards that protect the citizenry and create a level playing field internally (forget unions), allow movement within the borders to chase jobs as long as those jobs stay within the borders. Financial entities love free trade, because they don’t manufacture, they trade in money, not goods.
GE under the previous CEO became a financial house and thus preferred free trade. The current CEO has said that that was a wrong philosophy and detrimental to our interests.
April 1st, 2010 at 12:40 AM
Huh. I just went to find my chinese cleaver and I found about six old mild steel knives that I had forgotten that I had and two cleavers I had also forgotten and a steel. I should check my stash once in a while. I’ve got them all out to play with now. The curved cleavers are for meat I take it.