Monty Solomon wrote: > http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/press/2304.html Interesting article. Nothing new or surprising, except perhaps for the idea that today, the manufacturer has become the serf of the retailer, rather than the other way around. The retailer holds the cards. Maybe that's the long term answer to the oft-cited problem that off-shore manufacturing takes away jobs. Maybe the answer is that there's inherent value in being the distributor and retailer (and the guy specifying the features) of manufactured products. And maybe that's going to become the foundation upon which the economies of developed countries will be based. In a previous Frontline show, they showed how western economies after WWII grew baseed on the "producer becomes also the consumer" model. The guy building the Vespa motor scooter also became the customer for the washing machine. That's how the economy boomed. So now the economy is morphing into the retailer becoming also the consumer. Since the retailer is the guy who interfaces with the consumer, he will be the guy best suited to specifying the products to be manufactured. I don't see anything inherently wrong with this economic model, compared with the one where the manufacturer became the consumer. Nor is it obvious to me that the new version of retailer would necessarily command lower wages than what the factory line worker was earning. But it is a different skill set to teach. Bert ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can UNSUBSCRIBE from the OpenDTV list in two ways: - Using the UNSUBSCRIBE command in your user configuration settings at FreeLists.org - By sending a message to: opendtv-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word unsubscribe in the subject line.