bull's-eye!
That's exactly my impression. With the loss of 1st world employment and compensation, people buy rubbish that will last a fraction of the old inexpensive items, and hope that everything will turn around before it goes bad/wears out/becomes useless and they have to buy replacements. But the rubbish goes so quickly that they never have a chance.
""We have to offshore because we can't find the skills locally...." is pure baloney"
Right. "Because we can't find one person with this excessive pie-in-the-sky wish-list within 3 blocks of the office, we have to ignore the whole rest of the country and go straight to the 3rd world for several units of cheap young pliant labor with flexible ethics, instead." There's "local" and then there's "local" and they're hoping we don't know the difference. There are actual skills, actual knowledge and capabilities, and then there are "key-words"; totally different, but the terminology allows the malefactors to conflate them.
Love those ads that say "must have 3-7 years of experience"; so, if you've got 30 years of experience you're not "qualified"?! And "guest-workers wanted" means "citizens need not apply", because we will find a pretext to declare that you are "unqualified" even if we have to have 4 law firms on retainer to help do it.
