Grew up with Duralex Provence as the 'regular milk / water glass' here in Norway. Never broke one by accident. Excellent glasses.
'The French people want to save us': help pours in for glassmaker Duralex
91–100 of 141 posts
Re: 'The French people want to save us': help pours in for glassmaker Duralex
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
You realize there's an entire spectrum of socialist ideology between liberalism and authoritarian planned economies, yeah? It's not a Boolean, and it's not a slippery slope. We could have broadly liberal markets owned and run by the workers, and without the authoritarianism.
This is a slippery slope... The comment I replied to is an example of that: specifically on this aspect, it doesn't really matter whether a company is owned and run by the workers (we can have thay today and we do), but if it operates in a free market then it has to compete. Wishing that there wasn't competition is the slippery slope that ends badly, always. Obviously mandating workers-ownership is authoritarian in i…
Wishing that there wasn't competition is the slippery slope
Nobody is doing that. The article specifically mentions pursuing opportunities in the export market.
Obviously mandating workers-ownership is authoritarian in itself.
The workers bought out the previous owners, presumably due to frustration with the firm having had 4 near-collapses in the last 20 years under the capitalistic management approach.Your objections seem conditioned rather than considered; did you actually think any of this through, or are just just reacting to concepts that make you uncomfortable while overlooking the facts?
Re: 'The French people want to save us': help pours in for glassmaker Duralex
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
The main they don't survive is not due to capitalism. (Capitalism is just trade without use of force at the end of the day) but due to the lobbying power of corporations. Corporations constantly lobby the government for more regulation and rules, which they just budget for, but smaller companies don't have the funds to meet so they cannot stay in business. Look at the first couple of years of COVID for example, Walma…
> the small businesses got wiped out due to their lack of lobbying power Small businesses have a lot if lobbying power (NFIB, US Chamber of Commerce to a certain extent) especially during the pandemic. The PPP loan forgiveness program was ridiculously generous. Despite it being marketed as a way to save jobs, only a third of the money ended up going towards jobs that were at risk.
Those are good points, but it again shows how government getting involved does more harm than good.
The government forced the lockdowns instead of letting people make their decisions about their health, then they tries to aid the businesses they caused to suffer, and most of the money didn't end up where it was supposed to. So many examples of this over and over when you look at government involvement.
> The fantastic 7 tech companies, get billions of dollars from the government grants, tax breaks, business
> We have 4 ISP's that monopolize the market, due to the government giving them billions of dollars to expand infrastructure, which they misappropriated and then uses for lobbying against small ISP's
> The SNAP program subsidizes big companies like Walmart, target, etc due to them being able to eat the costs of all the massive regulatiom around it.
> etc. etc. etc.
Re: 'The French people want to save us': help pours in for glassmaker Duralex
#94Duralex is good quality anyway, very strong against breaking but they do scratch pretty badly
The reason you see a lot of scratches on Duralex glasses in cafés and canteens is because they are so old, having lasted an order of magnitude longer than other glassware.
Re: 'The French people want to save us': help pours in for glassmaker Duralex
#95New products and new markets clearly help finances. Burning that much gas has got to be their major expense. Are there other way to heat the furnaces?
When they recently decided solar furnaces were not cost effective for electricity production (compared to solar panels), I did wonder if they couldn't be adapted to the production of energy intensive products like glass, bricks, or concrete.
Re: 'The French people want to save us': help pours in for glassmaker Duralex
#96I 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 get it—they’re expensive and so on—but they really are a superior product. Where are you? Here in France they are not expensive. I bought them at Carrefour when I moved here because I liked the Picardie shape and I thought they were just one of many companies that makes them. They were surprisingly cheap (a bit more than 1 euro per glass iirc).
Bought one in Berlin and I would say they are 2-3 times the price of the cheapest competitor, but still worth it. I believe the US used to have their own more rectangular version of the glass.
Re: 'The French people want to save us': help pours in for glassmaker Duralex
#97As the article said Duralex was the brand use by a large number of school cantinas in France. Inside of each glass there’s a small number used by the brand to identify the mold used for the creation of the glass. 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). That’s why the CE is holding his glass like that in the guardian article. Besid…
To complete, the number was also deciding what age we were for that day
Re: 'The French people want to save us': help pours in for glassmaker Duralex
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
And not only homes. I moved to France several months ago, and I keep seeing the Duralex mark in cafes, at my workplace, basically everywhere.
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.
Yeah, they're known for being practically unbreakable. Couldn't tell you how many times I dropped my Duralex glasses with them not breaking.
Re: 'The French people want to save us': help pours in for glassmaker Duralex
#99As the article said Duralex was the brand use by a large number of school cantinas in France. Inside of each glass there’s a small number used by the brand to identify the mold used for the creation of the glass. 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). That’s why the CE is holding his glass like that in the guardian article. Besid…
>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.
Re: 'The French people want to save us': help pours in for glassmaker Duralex
#100Earlier 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.…
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 other firms like Boeing? That type of authority structure introduces its own set of distortions, which usually skew towards shareholders, and often not towards long term sustainability.
As a worker, I would be against that decision for selfish reasons as well as for rational reasons. It sounds like a bad idea. If they want to sell commodity glassware, then that’s a race to the bottom. But they’re selling quality, which requires humans with skill.
> In general coops are not good at tough decisions and innovation.
This needs to be backed up. Mondragon in Spain has thrived for decades. In America, mutual aid societies used to provide health care, unemployment insurance and other benefits before being squeezed out by other groups who were better at things like regulatory capture.
There is a long history of cooperative ownership that goes beyond the stereotypical hippie grocery store. I think it’s too quick to dismiss Duralex.