I couldn't disagree more. I'm not against the idea of paying more for a better product, and that means paying for the R&D needed to develop the product. Having said that, as far as R&D is concerned, at best a brand new MS661 is only marginally better than the 066 saws that first hit the shelves over 30 years ago. There are some who would argue that those old 066 saws are actually as good or better than what you can buy today. Until Stihl released the 500, the about the only saw in the past 30 years that was a noticeable improvement was the MS261. So much for the idea of paying a premium price to get the best R&D for the past 30 years.... That shouldn't be a surprise though since there's no real magic to designing or building 2 cycle engines.
What you are actually talking about isn't R&D and testing. You're really talking about overhead, of which R&D and testing is only a small portion of. The primary difference in the Chinese clones and their genuine OEM counterparts is overhead and profit margins, and overhead is the lions share of that. The cheapest price for an assembled Farmertec G660 is currently $190. Given, you have to buy 10 of them to get one for this price, but that gives us a pretty good idea of what it costs to actually manufacture the components to build an MS661. For the sake of argument, I'll even double that cost to $380 to make sure you're getting top quality parts (these would be costs to the MFG, not consumer costs). Now, how long would it take a skilled assembly worker to assemble a saw start to finish? I'll be overly conservative here and say that it takes half a shift. Lets assume this highly skilled assembly worker is making $40/hr. Lets double that to cover their benefits and make it $80/hr. That brings the cost of the saw to $800. Coincidently, that's about what some custom shops charge to build a ported, bulletproof, big bore 066 clone that walks all over an MS661 both in performance and durability. I digress. At this price point HALF of what the major MFG are charging you goes to overhead. I haven't worked for Stihl, Husqvarna, or Echo, but I suspect they are like the major manufactures that I've worked for over nearly 3 decades now. If so, the bulk of that overhead goes to pay for a bloated management structure that's not smart enough to pour pi$$ out of their own boot. Meanwhile, they outsource as much of their supply chain as the can to minimize cost. The cost savings doesn't get passed on to the customer. The only things that gets passed on to the customer are the quality issues that come with the outsourced supply chain. So long as people are willing to pay the over inflated prices, the mfg have no reason to change the way they do business. This is why a 1/2 ton pickup truck now costs over $40K. The only options that consumers have is to pay the price, or find an alternative. In this case, the alternatives are crap saws like Poulan or Chinese clones. Between those two options, I'd choose the Chinese clone every time because they are a far better saw and can easily be upgraded to be a pretty exceptional saw. When a major manufacturer can manage to get their head out of their rear, get their overhead in check and sell their product for a reasonable price, I'd be more than happy to buy their product instead.
