The Chinese Make a Lousy Gas Can

Yup, I said it – the Commies do not know how to make a gas can with a vent or a bendable spout which does not spill or burp gasoline every time you try to fill your lawn mower’s gas tank, or your weed trimmer’s fuel reservoir.  It’s pathetic and it’s environmentally disgraceful!

There I am, in my own backyard trying to pour a copious amount of petrol (time is money and I don’t have the time or patience to trickle it in) into my grass-cutting machine and gabloop chug – a gurgling squirt of precious and potentially grass-killing fossil fuel regurgitates onto the mower engine and deck. The gas can-designing genius who ignorantly designed this can, left off the vent.

It’s a travesty.  Just try to find a fuel container designed by the Japanese.  Good luck – as if luck has anything to do with it.  The industrious Japanese (thank you Dr. W. Edwards Deming) raised their standard of living to the point that they cannot compete with the Commies in the gas can arena anymore.  Of course, all red-blooded Americans hated “Jap-junk” as it was called, but now we know and realize their stuff was actually an improvement over what we had initially created.  They ingeniously copied our stuff and improved it.

This is evidentially not the case with Chinese imported products.  They discovered that all they had to do was flood our market with cheaper products, regardless of the quality of said products, and they could eliminate the competition – and, we deal-hungry Americans would buy it regardless of a drop in quality.  And they were right.

Heck, we didn’t even notice.

The day after Thanksgiving is named “Black Friday”.  The reason for this goes something like this.  Back in 1966 the good folks in the City of Brotherly Love (the city with the most murders per capita) were out of control buying selling and celebrating Capitalism (spending money on Christmas presents) and the cops called it a Black Friday.

Supposedly these days, business owners go from being in the red to being in the black, or a place where they pass the break-even point.  Us product-savvy lemmings call it Deal Day and we rush out in record numbers and charge our credit cards up to get the great deals, only to pay interest down the road and end up getting the deal for more than the original price – and then we repeat it next year.

Mercifully, the National Retail Federation’s marketing web site SHOP.org invented a way to extend this frenzy for cheap Chinese inferior imports by inventing Cyber Monday.  Whoosh – ka-ching!  Another credit card gets punched, but this time it’s online, so its an even better deal.

Almost everything we buy falls into the same category as the gas can.  It all comes from China, is cheaper than the competition and pushes its way to the top, leaving us with fewer choices for quality goods (if it says NIKE on it, it MUST be good stuff). 

Buy a lawn mower or dishwasher and in 3-5 years, they’re both junk – throwaways. If you opt to have them repaired, it’s often cheaper to just buy a new one – another Chinese made sub-quality piece of short term junk. 

My Chinese-made gas can has a straight semi-ridged spout, so when I try to bend it, as I pour gas into my mower’s tank, it squirts the gas over the top of the fill hole, then it burps because the plastic can does not have a vent.  I’m weary of this.  I’m going to take an awl and poke a hole the top of the can behind the handle and cap it with a pencil. 

That’s all the control we got left in this country over products.