Comment by devjab
I got so frustrated trying to find some shelves recently that I ended up building them myself. It used to be that I could use Google to find some furniture stores, but now they all require me to throughly vet them to make sure they aren’t just reselling stuff from China or scam sites. Ikea still works, but that’s about it unless I go to big designer brands where a shelf will cost me a gazillion DKR. Unfortunately Ikea didn’t have any shelves that I liked, which is why I build them out of some wood I purchased in the local hardware store.
It’s so annoying that it’s almost impossible to find a legitimate store. Well maybe that’s not the correct way to word it. It’s so frustrating that it’s almost impossible to know whether or not the top shops you get in your search results are stores you want to use or not.
It's bad enough that manufacturers in China might start complaining about it as the best manufacturers there have a reputation to protect.
There is a mushroom grower in Shanghai, for instance, which grows very inexpensive but tasty beech mushrooms in a giant vertical farm where workers only touch the mushrooms with a forklift (see https://www.finc-sh.com/en/about.aspx#fincvideo)
There are numerous photography equipment vendors in China that make innovative and value-conscious products (like this inexpensive manual focus lens which takes pictures like you've never seen: https://7artisans.store/products/50mm-f1-05) that excel in customer support. They post real manuals to their web sites where you can easily find them, they correspond to you with email and not a ticket system behind a CAPTCHA, they don't have a huge list of unauthorized vendors for whom they won't support your product if you bought from them, etc. I hear back from them in 24 hours most of the time compared to an Italian vendor that makes great tripods but takes more like four days to respond.
If Chinese vendors are working that hard to get my business I very much want to support them.