Monday, October 24, 2005

Pride Lines in their own words....


I am going to wax nostalgic for a moment, please bear with me. I hate it when a good company slows down or goes away. Family business departures especially bother me. It isn't necessarily because I like the product (eventhough I do) or that I like the people (I do).

It bothers me because it signals a symptom. It is the changes our society seems to be going through that we shouldn't tolerate. I like doing business with people, families, whatever you want to call it, it's still me handing money to someone I know. They use it to buy goods and services for their company or more likely themselves. It's a one to one exchange and the money goes to other people within the community.

I'm not naive. I know that products get built by all kinds of people all over the place. But most of the products I have in my home are no longer built by people right here, in my country and in my neighborhood. Is it progress? Well, maybe. But probably not.

Just try calling a 1-800 line for help for your computer. Progress left the building long ago after it was outsourced. I speak to lots of customers all day long. They all call me because they like speaking to someone they know will fix what's broken and learn from the mistake.

Let me finish my waxing by saying I'll miss Pride Lines and the New York toys they made in Long Island. They are a company that made graceful little playthings that are now part of train collecting lore. Ok, I am calling the Minwax people to remind me that they are the one's making the wax, not me.

I was scanning a ton of old literature the other day and came across this article by John Davanzano about his company; Pride Lines. I was going to do some OCR and try to scan it in, I just decided that you all can read it as intended. Check it out, it has some things I didn't know about Pride Lines.

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