Comment by devjab
2 months ago
I got so frustrated trying to find some shelves recently that I ended up building them myself. It used to be that I could use Google to find some furniture stores, but now they all require me to throughly vet them to make sure they aren’t just reselling stuff from China or scam sites. Ikea still works, but that’s about it unless I go to big designer brands where a shelf will cost me a gazillion DKR. Unfortunately Ikea didn’t have any shelves that I liked, which is why I build them out of some wood I purchased in the local hardware store.
It’s so annoying that it’s almost impossible to find a legitimate store. Well maybe that’s not the correct way to word it. It’s so frustrating that it’s almost impossible to know whether or not the top shops you get in your search results are stores you want to use or not.
It's bad enough that manufacturers in China might start complaining about it as the best manufacturers there have a reputation to protect.
There is a mushroom grower in Shanghai, for instance, which grows very inexpensive but tasty beech mushrooms in a giant vertical farm where workers only touch the mushrooms with a forklift (see https://www.finc-sh.com/en/about.aspx#fincvideo)
There are numerous photography equipment vendors in China that make innovative and value-conscious products (like this inexpensive manual focus lens which takes pictures like you've never seen: https://7artisans.store/products/50mm-f1-05) that excel in customer support. They post real manuals to their web sites where you can easily find them, they correspond to you with email and not a ticket system behind a CAPTCHA, they don't have a huge list of unauthorized vendors for whom they won't support your product if you bought from them, etc. I hear back from them in 24 hours most of the time compared to an Italian vendor that makes great tripods but takes more like four days to respond.
If Chinese vendors are working that hard to get my business I very much want to support them.
I borrowed a Laowa 100mm macro lens (Venus Optics) for a little while. The only reason I didn't buy one is it disabled TTL since it lacked the required electronics.
https://www.venuslens.net/product/laowa-100mm-f-2-8-2x-macro...
There are also several Chinese graphics tablet companies that Wacom still doesn't realize it's in competition with.
It depends what kind of shooting you are doing. I depend on autofocus for a lot of the work I do (sports) but I have more fun shooting with my manual 7Artisans lens with the aperture ring than I do with a Zeiss 55mm/1.4. The 7Artisans lens has weaknesses that show up when you try astrophotography with it (definitely some light goes the wrong way and bright stars turn into weird shapes) but it also takes great shots like
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/111077882869934997
(freakin’ at night!) I bought this ring flash
https://godox.com/product-d/MF-R76.html
which requires manual metering to save more than $100 off one which has TTL metering as I am using it for studio work where I am going to set it up once and take 20 shots.
I was looking for a product recently. I wanted to buy from a UK business.
I found countless Web stores pretending to be UK businesses complete with founder stories and convincing copy... All turning out to be Chinese fronts.
They know the tide is against them and see starting to employ some shady tactics to get sales.
At the same time the big money in China is buying westernised historic brands to trade through.
I'm not anti-China for goods and services, but I am against the deceptive practices I've been seeing.
> they aren’t just reselling stuff from China
At this point everything you buy is from China in some way or the other. From iPhones to Nikes, from your electronic batteries to garlic. At this point stuff from China isn’t exactly a bad thing, considering how poorly things made elsewhere are doing. I have had so many issues with American made things that I almost prefer items made elsewhere. From cars to refrigerators.
I don’t mind products from China as long as they live up to EU regulations. If they are resold from places like Temu and similar then they’ve been found to be out right dangerous in some cases and in most they don’t live up to any of our safety standards. This isn’t an issue with “normal” stores which do their due diligence in their supply chain. Yes, it sometimes goes wrong, but it doesn’t happen often and when it does they inform you and recall products.
I can’t tell the authentic stores with legitimate quality control apart from the ones which will shut down and reopen with a new name next month.