Excerpts from Wikipedia: Huffy Bicycles had manufacturing and assembly facilities in Azusa,
California (closed in the late 1970s), and Ponca City Oklahoma (closed
in the early 1980s), but largely manufactured most of their bicycles in
Celina, Ohio, and at one time was Celina's largest employer. At their
peak, the bicycle division manufactured over two million bicycles per
year and were the
free world's largest bike company.
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Angela Connolly, riding her 2003 Huffy Prospect - made in China. |
By the mid 1990s, Huffy was in deep financial trouble. The U.S.
Bicycle industry had consolidated, sharply reducing the number of
channels for selling bikes. High-volume retailers had claimed three
fourths of the U.S. market, gaining tremendous leverage over bicycle
makers.
Wal Mart in particular was pressuring Huffy: it ordered 900,000
bikes at one time, but insisted that Huffy lower its prices
significantly. To remain a major player in the bicycle market, the Ohio
company had little choice but to agree. Even with Huffy's other
non-unionized manufacturing plants, it could not make a profit selling
bicycles at the prices Wal Mart, its biggest customer, was willing to
pay. After requesting and getting a pay cut for its unionized workforce
in Ohio, Huffy returned to profitability for two years only to again
crumple under the pricing pressure applied by Wal Mart. This forced
Huffy to close its Celina, Ohio plant and
lay off all 935 employees. Their other two factories in Missouri and Mississippi soon fell to the
same fate for the same reason.
Even after subcontracting production to
China, where plant workers earned only
25 to 41 cents per hour, it
remained unable to operate at a profit.
In federal banktruptcy court in Dayton, Ohio, in 2004, Huffy's assets
were turned over to its Chinese creditors. After years of struggling
against the cut-rate Chinese bicycles that set the price target guiding
Wal-Mart, Huffy essentially had become a Chinese-owned company.
[Full article ...]
Poster's note: Well, there you have it, folks. Check out
Big Box Swindle for more details.
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In 1998, Huffy Corporation produced the high quality M600 Mountain Bike for Raleigh, the frame manufactured here in the USA. It was a last gasp effort at solvency before collapsing under pressure from Wal-Mart. Hundreds of American jobs paying a living wage were swapped for poverty class wages in China. | |
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Hey, it's always sad to know about someones degradation. Every corporation have had to face such situation when they had fallen into financial crisis. Huffy bicycles financial crisis was the sole reason for their collapse and it was obvious for them to be sold to the Chinese-owned company. But since then, bicycle industry have tremendously improved and their are many premium quality as well as cheap bicycles like best performance hybrid bikes available in the market from different manufacturers.
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