How, exactly, has anything improved in manufacturing? As a rule of thumb, any time you see a Phillips head or Pozidrive screw, you are looking at a product tha

How, exactly, has anything improved in manufacturing? As a rule of thumb, any time you see a Phillips head or Pozidrive screw, you are looking at a product that was assembled by hand, the way things were done 100 years ago.. If that seems prohibitively expensive for the product you are holding in your hand, well, that is why manufacturing has fled the USA. It's hard to make a $10 toaster if your workers demand reasonable wages. A Hobart mini-mixer is still made more or less the same way it was in 1935, out of rather similar input components and materials, and it is still assembled in the USA. We can make electronics a lot cheaper than we did in 1935 (transistors are lots cheaper than valves aka vacuum tubes!) but we can't do that for an electric motor, or for the chassis, or the various tools that attach. Those are all very similar to their 1935 versions.