Penn Reel's Movin on out

[seabuggy]

Penn reels have been my preference for 40 years. They have, however been declining in quality. I have two Penn Squidders that are 30 years old. Two years ago, I tried to buy a new one. Every one in the store had the same defect. The spool adjustment would not work. Across the board, thier models do not compare with those of the competition. This is sad, a piece of Americana is passing before our eyes. This must be a conspericy by the tree huggers and animal(fish) rights groups.

[pmueller]

Gotta agree with specialist. The savings will not be past on to the customer on the series of reels on the market today. Just improving the margin.

[Roseneath]

[FONT=Arial] Its scary to see long time, US-based, companies ship over seas (Penn being the most recent), but what incentive does a manufacturing company have for staying in the US?

High cost in salaries, due to the high cost of living, prevents most products from being competitively priced in the market.

There's still jobs and money in the US (and more importantly NE), but most seem to be in the service or sales industry.

[lurch]

When have we ever seen prices go down for ANYTHING? Having the jobs shipped over seas will only increase the profit marging of the products. The odd thing is that Penn does not have to listen to stock holders as they are a private company. Simply put the companies get more bang for their buck overseas!

[TheSpecialist]

When have we ever seen prices go down for ANYTHING? Having the jobs shipped over seas will only increase the profit marging of the products. The odd thing is that Penn does not have to listen to stock holders as they are a private company. Simply put the companies get more bang for their buck overseas!

Like I said before how is this a good thing then? They will not get a better price on materials, and are going to have to spend a ton of dough on tooling. If anything it will allow a company with a subpar product to be around a little longer. If they really wanted to compete, they could buy better components, maybe make a few design changes, and still have the reels assembled here in the USA. Their problem is that the reels have been unimproved for years, there is no smoothness compared to say a Stradic, or Stella. Eventually the only jobs that will be left in the good ole USA, will be the mega million dollar CEO.

[basswipe]

This has been a long time coming.

Penn simply couldn't compete with companies like Tica and Okuma economically
speaking and couldn't match the quality of companies like Shimano.

It will be a shame to see the Z series reels disappear.

[pmueller]

Unfortunately for Penn, I really beleive alot of their market was from folks that wanted to buy an american product. One would have tought that they could have kept some sort of american product line going, just to keep that reputation alive. I guess time will tell.

[Fishpart]

I can't say for sure, but it looks like Corporate America will be chasing cheap labor around the Globe for a while. It was South Korea in the 80's, NAFTA (Thanks Billy from AR) in the 90's and now companies are moving manufacturing from Korea and Mexico to China to get cheaper labor............I'm sure if West and Central Africa had any infastructure we would be right there, shipping would certainly be less than from China....

The only way we can compete is by taking labor out of our manufactured product.

We all need to vote with our money and avoid Chinese product whenever possible.........

[pmueller]

Your right on there. From a business perspective, I'm sure they feel there is no other choice. They are taking off the table the very reason why they had so much customer loyalty.
The only way they could capture the market they may loosel would be offering a high end reel( high perfomance reel) at extremely competative price.