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'The French people want to save us': help pours in for glassmaker Duralex

theguardian.com

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Re: 'The French people want to save us': help pours in for glassmaker Duralex

#111

Post by cgearhart »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #49
cgearhart wrote: post #39

I have bought a lot of glassware over a couple decades. My usual trick is to look at restaurant supply shops, since they usually have a wide variety to select trade offs in style, price, quality, etc. Somehow I’d never come across Duralex until a few months ago when I was shopping to reorganize my own cupboards. The Duralex stuff I got has been the best glassware I’ve ever had, hands down. I’ll probably order more to…

I've never bought a glass in my life. We just use old Vegemite jars here in Australia.

Many years ago it was Hershey chocolate fudge jars that we’d put in the cupboard when they were empty. Then shrinkflation led to smaller jars and it lost some of the charm. I still have a few of the old ones.

Re: 'The French people want to save us': help pours in for glassmaker Duralex

#112

Post by sdqali »

smcin wrote: post #87
anigbrowl wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like their biggest problem is that the product is so good the domestic market may be saturated. I was pleased to read in the article that they're working to increase exports. I'm a big believer in products that are engineered to last rather than be regularly replaced.

> Sounds like their biggest problem is that the product is so good the domestic market may be saturated. Sad how rare that is these days. Which other companies does that apply to?

Lodge, the American maker of cast-iron cookware is a possibility.

Re: 'The French people want to save us': help pours in for glassmaker Duralex

#113

Post by WawaFin »

Broussebar wrote: post #99
Zababa wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>For kids that was a way to decide who is going to fetch the water for the table (smaller number or higher number of the table). I only knew the version where your age is the number on the glass. For fetching water, it was the slowest person to say "pot d'eau" (water jug) and sometimes put a hand to your head (it depended on the group).

I might have generalized then. It’s maybe something that we had only in the south (aka the broc à eau area). We also used it to check our age of course.

no I was in IDF and the glass gets your age and the oldest or youngest had to fetch the water, so it not only in the south

Re: 'The French people want to save us': help pours in for glassmaker Duralex

#114

Post by mytailorisrich »

aaplok wrote: post #108
dimal wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were they a coop when they went bankrupt? According to the article, they only became a coop recently, so having a CEO capable of firing everyone didn’t work out for them. They took investors, who agreed to the rate of return on their investment. That doesn’t sound like charity. Now, your example of a CEO that wants to fire everyone assumes that that’s the right decision. How well has that kind of thinking worked for…

> Were they a coop when they went bankrupt? They were not. In fact they went through series of mass-redundancy episodes that were supposed to save them from bankruptcy, soon followed by yet another bankruptcy. The COOP might fail. Indeed the call for contributions discussed in the article was motivated by that risk. But it won't fail because it was a COOP, because every CEO who tried also failed to save it. The COOP…

Their Wikipedia page says that headcount is flat to increasing over the last 10 years.

The coop structure is a result of their bankruptcy in 2024. As I understand, this was the proposal that didn't involve any layoffs and it was chosen by the bankruptcy court. They also got a large de facto subsidy. The fact that they have run out of money again so quickly (the root of the article) is quite worrying to say the least.

None of that changes anything to the points of my previous comment.

Re: 'The French people want to save us': help pours in for glassmaker Duralex

#115

Post by dragonwriter »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #83
dimal wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Most large corporations I’ve dealt with are highly bureaucratic and resistant to change. Good ideas get lost in silos or bogged down in bureaucracy. Whether it works or not seems entirely dependent on whether the company has a moat around their revenue stream, which allows them to be inefficient everywhere else. For an employee owned co-op, a more anarchistic organization structure that allows for more employee…

If the employees have the power then decisions that are good for company but bad for the employees won't be made. Let's say that the company can't compete so the CEO proposes to automate production and lay off 50%+ of the employees, do you think employees will vote in favour? In general coops are not good at tough decisions and innovation. Duralex already went bankrupt several times and they are heading for it again.…

> If the employees have the power then decisions that are good for company but bad for the employees won't be made.

"The company" is a fiction. Real parties are, e.g., employees, capital owners, suppliers, and customers (and, to the extent that any of those are corporations or similar convenient fictions, the same kinds of groups with respect to those entities.)

With a pure labor coop (which an SCOP isn't quite, put similar enough that it works as an approximation for discussing general traits), "capital owners" and "employees" are the same group, rather than different groups whose interests are frequently adversarial.

> Let's say that the company can't compete so the CEO proposes to automate production and lay off 50%+ of the employees, do you think employees will vote in favour?

Quite possibly, though because of this exact issue (and generally the need to buy out ownership shares of terminated employees), labor coops are less likely to go on hiring binges that force them to rapidly and massively downsize to survive when the conditions that drove the binge change.

Re: 'The French people want to save us': help pours in for glassmaker Duralex

#116

Post by dyauspitr »

cgearhart wrote: post #39

I have bought a lot of glassware over a couple decades. My usual trick is to look at restaurant supply shops, since they usually have a wide variety to select trade offs in style, price, quality, etc. Somehow I’d never come across Duralex until a few months ago when I was shopping to reorganize my own cupboards. The Duralex stuff I got has been the best glassware I’ve ever had, hands down. I’ll probably order more to…

Totally superior but it’s the one type of glass my dishwasher just cannot seem to get clean. I wonder what the reason is.

Re: 'The French people want to save us': help pours in for glassmaker Duralex

#117

Post by aaplok »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #114
aaplok wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Were they a coop when they went bankrupt? They were not. In fact they went through series of mass-redundancy episodes that were supposed to save them from bankruptcy, soon followed by yet another bankruptcy. The COOP might fail. Indeed the call for contributions discussed in the article was motivated by that risk. But it won't fail because it was a COOP, because every CEO who tried also failed to save it. The COOP…

Their Wikipedia page says that headcount is flat to increasing over the last 10 years. The coop structure is a result of their bankruptcy in 2024. As I understand, this was the proposal that didn't involve any layoffs and it was chosen by the bankruptcy court. They also got a large de facto subsidy. The fact that they have run out of money again so quickly (the root of the article) is quite worrying to say the least.…

Except that these employees had been put on temporary unemployment (chômage partiel) [0] and their difficulties have been going on for much longer than 10 years.

Ultimately all I am saying is that other structures have not fared better than the COOP. Claiming that the potential current failure is because the COOP prevents hard decisions to be made while ignoring the fact that the previous owner lasted 3 years before failing (in spite of the temporary unemployment decisions) is not logical.

[0] https://www.novethic.fr/economie-et-social/business-model-en...

Re: 'The French people want to save us': help pours in for glassmaker Duralex

#118

Post by wpm »

tormeh wrote: post #43

I remember looking at their website and thinking the product design was horrible. The "Picardie" design is iconic, but not really in a good way. In my mind it says "functional" and "old". That's probably unfair, but it is what it is. Everything else they have is generic in the extreme. The IKEA catalog has far more interesting glassware.

I’m not sure my drinking glasses are a place I really need “modern” and “new” and “whatever the opposite of functional” is. It’s a glass for drinking liquid out of. There is no innovation. There is no novel design yet to be found. It’s an almost ancient device. It should be functional above all else. They are for drinking water out of, not fucking decor.

And for what it’s worth, if you don’t like the Picardie glasses, they have like a dozen other shapes that might feel “modern” enough.

Re: 'The French people want to save us': help pours in for glassmaker Duralex

#119

Post by wpm »

constantcrying wrote: post #23
mrweasel wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's probably their problem, cheap and long lasting isn't good for business.

Their products are extremely expensive.

Even in the US looking at their site I’m not getting sticker shock from anything I’m seeing.

Re: 'The French people want to save us': help pours in for glassmaker Duralex

#120

Post by namlem »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #24
pjerem wrote: post #6

The article mentions it, but don’t insist on it. Duralex is now quite a special company: they were a renowned and beloved brand that was heading toward bankruptcy, until last year when the company was bought by its own workers and turned into a cooperative. Since then, they have stayed afloat, probably thanks mainly to people wanting to support a worker-owned business by buying their glasses, but still, it works. It’…

There's a reason why worker owned companies (which were quite prevalent and a key factor in the 20th century's socialist movements) did not survive in our capitalist world. If we want to see these kinds of companies thrive, we need to change the entire market philosophy. Otherwise they will always be out-competed by companies that favour revenue/profit over worker benefits. In fact they will not even take off in the…

There are many successful co-ops all over the world, including in the US. You just don't hear about them because they don't look much different from corporations from the perspective of the average person.
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