Recalling your battery price trend...
Renewable Energy Will Only Be Possible With Massive Increases in the Supply of Critical Minerals
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3779316/posts
And that is not the half of it.
We have been reeled in by master fishermen.
Chum the water, cheap labor; will more than cover transportation costs.
Bait the hook with big flashy bucks $$$; look at the money Jack Ma made with Alibaba $$$, you can not count that high!
Nibbling, so play them slow for the big one; so cheap, no need for local US supplies.
Gently set the hook so they won’t notice; load them with our best engineers and workers, copy everything.
Now set the hook hard, no escapes; new rules for repatriation of profits from China.
Careful with the gaff, lots left on this one; the workers are striking for higher wages.
Ready to land the beauty; Tesla Gigafactory closes for lack of local sales, too bad, so sad.
What a delightful fish dinner; and the price of fish has just skyrocketed!
Nothing wrong trading with China, a fat Chinaman is less dangerous than one with nothing left to lose.
A coworker did QC in China for Dell, he said they would cut any possible corner but with tight specs and closely watched did very nice work.
A friend says, cut out the middle man, buy it straight from China, a good plan.
About a third of the stuff I buy is junk and was probably taken from the rework bin.
I’ve had better luck with stuff made for local consumption with Chinese instructions, Chinglish descriptions, software drivers all Chinese all the time…
That is true, especially with items like li-ion batteries. I used to get most of them through a place called Deal Xtreme. There were other Chinese outlets one could purchase direct from, but DX.com had adopted the Amazon user rating and review system even before most Americans knew much about Amazon. So your chance of receiving a bad product were greatly reduced. It took close to a month for an order to arrive, but items cost much less than what you would typically find on eBay and this was before Amazon was selling much of anything other than books. This was also before Alibaba really took off and it was much more consumer friendly and oriented.
I bought mostly batteries and flashlights but also electronics, computer parts, cables, specialty tools and novelty items. I got some crap on a couple of occasions, but was pretty happy 95% of the time. At this point, they are still cheaper than Amazon or eBay most of the time, but I am too hooked on fast delivery and easy returns to bother with them. Although, DX.com did open a couple of warehouses in the United States to try and compete.
The big problem for me with them at this point is still the returns, although I believe they have gotten much better at this as well. But the last thing I returned to Amazon, all I had to do was report that I wanted to return the item on the order page, put it back in its manufacturer's packaging, take it to a UPS store and let them scan the return UPC on my phone, and the UPS store packed it in a shipping box and shipped it back to Amazon. My account was credited before I got home... incredible! That damn Bezos knows how to keep customers happy.
So I just looked at DX.com and most of the stuff still looked less expensive than what you would find on Amazon or eBay, but I have gotten too spoiled to bother with them at this point. And you might also still get away without paying sales tax. So it's not something that I would rule out completely.