Greg M.
My bad
Friday, January 03, 2020, 22:35

JT's post certainly doesn't imply the husband worked for Colt. The point I was trying to make was that there was somebody at the company who cared about her job and did right by the customer, and then she went away due to extrinsic factors. Sorry if it didn't come across the way I meant it.

My comment -- which is mine alone -- was meant to articulate my lived experience with Colt products, which hasn't lived up to the "dream vision" of Colt which their highly successful advertising campaigns, going back for the better part of 200 years, implanted in my brain when I was just a little guy.

I really don't mean to single out Colt in particular -- it's my experience as a consumer (not as an engineer or professional gunsmith) that many companies coast on the reputation of past glories and/or clever advertising campaigns as opposed to the quality of their product. It's also my experience that the smoke and mirrors tend to dissipate in the harsh light of reality once people actually use the product and it has to stand on its own merits. Everyone else's mileage may vary.

To criticize only myself, trying to compare 1873 or 1913 Colt when "they" were at the top of their game to 1973 Colt or 2023 Colt is almost certainly a worthless endeavor. No doubt manufacturing methods and economic incentives have changed. I guess I expect too much out of corporate America . . . businesses exist first and foremost to make a profit, sure, but I am old-fashioned enough to think that it makes business sense to manufacture the best quality product possible at a price the average working person can pay. That was Henry Ford's ideology (he didn't see any point in making cars that the workers who were making them couldn't afford). Ford and Colt are both old, iconic American brands that have history and emotional freight for nearly everybody living in this country. That's why it bothers me when the marketing takes precedence over the product and the product doesn't live up to the marketing.