[bgadow]

A lot of good stuff here! Well, there are many issues a play.

Once, most consumer electronics used to be sold by independent operators-little TV shops, smaller department stores & furnture stores, plus locally operated (sometimes locally owned) stores like Western Auto and the little catalog stores of Sears & Wards. There was a lot of markup involved and a tv set was a big investment. In many places, store owners were a part of the community. Gradually, though, big boxes took over. Partly they did it by cutting out the middleman (the distributor) and selling the sets to the public for about what the independent stores were buying them for. I doubt, today, that a small time operator could buy sets from a wholesaler for a price much different than what Wal*Mart sells them for. This has driven a steady deflation in prices of electronics and also most major appliances. The price of a 19" color tv has steadily dropped since the 60s, while the product grew much more advanced. It is debatable as to how much better the new set is, but in many respects it is a better set. Now, a TV set built like the Sharp that was mentioned...even a set like that, today, would be overpriced. They have cheapened the construction since then. Look at something like a 1972 Zenith solid state set, or a Motorola Quasar "works in a drawer" set-those were expensive to build-how much would they cost today? A horizontal chassis solid state Zenith might cost over a thousand dollars, compared to a "Changchong" at Wal*Mart that sells for under $100. Thing is that the general public is not that perceptive of quality to pay ten times more for the better crafted set. As others have said, reliablity/quality is not on their minds when they make the purchase. There were a number of "quality houses" that dissapeared from the tv business long, long ago-the orginal DuMont, Stromberg-Carlson, Andrea, etc. As far back as the fifties they found themselves struggling to keep afloat in the market because their products, as nice as they were, didn't do that much more than did a cheap Muntz. Which brings this point: TV sets became a commodity. It started to happen as far back as the 50s. By the middle of that decade a black and white tv was about as good as it was going to get. It took a lot longer for color to reach that stage, but certainly it had by the eighties. It didn't matter, by the time the Sharp was built, which brand you bought. They were all good. They all had a good color picture. Once the public notices that a Chevy drives the same as an Oldsmobile people stop paying more for the name. Once people discovered that a Zenith doesn't do anything that a Changchong can't do, well, Zenith was in trouble.