Scott, I also do not mean to be a jerk, but I am in the manufacturing business(not bowling balls), and we are a small company with less than 30 employees and I can assure you it is not as easy and cheap as you might think. The facility alone is very expensive and I am down here in real estate friendly Texas (again I know because we are currently looking to expand), the machinery is also very expensive (again I know because we just bought some), the cost of the molds is also very expensive (again we own a few aluminum molds), then we get to the environmental expense involved with all the chemicals that are used, and let me tell you brother you own it from cradle to grave, then comes the labor and training to run all this stuff, sell it, and so on. You do not just pay the hourly rate, you also pay for most of the benefits you offer also like health insurance and of course payroll taxes, and you toss in a engineer and a chemist and I can assure you it is not cheap, then there comes inventory and the expense that comes with that like the monthly inventory tax. Sorry about the long post but what I am getting to is I am sure the companies that do not manufacture themselves have weighed all this long ago and have gone the way they have, and I would not change the route we have taken even with all the expense and so on.
--------------------
----------------------------------------
Patrick
