… where does that put us?

CONSUMERISM:

See the 42-litre plastic tub pictured above? It has two handles for easy use and is made of flexible plastic! It’s light, making it ideal for dragging around the garden and carting off unwanted green waste!

And it came at the amazingly competitive price of only $3.95, plucked by The Bug from those bargain bins that are the Coles version of the ones you see at Aldi.

$3.95! Yes, of course it’s from China! And don’t be fooled by the very English sounding brandname. GreenLeaf is probably the name of a relatively new city of some eight-million Chinese people on the banks of the Yangtze River, renowned for its GreenLeaf products. There’d be a sister city across the river called Gardenline, pumping out a similar range of products.

But for now, let’s just marvel at how Coles has managed to put this flexitub in its Westfield, Chermside, store for that bargain basement price of $3.95.

Firstly, let’s detract that GST of some 36c that goes straight into federal coffers. The importers of this product, Electaserv Trading of Lytton in Brisbane, has imported … ah, hem … bucketloads of these tubs – by ship, supposedly – and has sold them to Coles who, presumably, are still making a bob by selling them for that $3.95.

Okay, okay! We accept that maybe customer demand for these things wasn’t that high and maybe Coles is copping a loss to clear them from those bargain bins. But we doubt it.

The bottom line is that most Australian households can do an inventory of just about everything they’ve bought over recent years and the vast majority will be made in China. And the simple explanation for that is we couldn’t produce any of that product at anywhere near as cheaply.

So why is China in trouble economically? It might have a growing middle class but a $3.95 garden tub in Coles suggests many of its citizens are still prepared to work for Chinese peanuts in cities like the aforementioned GreenLeaf and Gardenline. Crikey, we haven’t even mentioned the Chinese city of Crofton, home of an excellent range of English crockery wares! Or Ryobi, that pumps out battery-operated power garden/handyman tools!

So we repeat. If China is having economic wobbles filling up most of our major stores with all the manufactured stuff we buy, where does that put poor old Oz?

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