A sad story about the Dafron company, which made an iconic notebook used for decades in Israel:
One look at the Hebrew word mahberet – notebook – arching in print on thin brown paper brings back countless memories of school days. From now on it will be possible to see such notebooks only among keepsakes in storage, for those who have had the sense to keep them. This summer, for the first time, the Dafron company’s trademark brown notebooks will not be sold on the back-to-school market, after more than 60 years. The decline in demand, in the wake of the transition to computer technology, along with cheap imports of paper notebooks from the Far East and Hebron, have made their production in Israel uneconomical. Dafron’s two major competitors, Daftar and H.M.N., both shut down more than a decade ago, and now the largest manufacturer has also given up after production drastically decreased over the past decade.
Read more at Saying goodbye to Israel’s beloved notebook – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News.
Capitalism at its worst and its best with an ironic twist of a conspiracy to manipulate the market.
A changing marketplace forces changes in the industry that supplies it. Should we have import tariffs on Chinese notebooks to the benefit of made-in-the-USA Ecosystems? Is that government intrusion into a free market economy? Is that protectionism? What would Ronald Reagan do? What would Richard Nixon do? What should Obama do? why don’t we start Occupy Notebooks?
A sad yet all too real consequence of relying too much on technology…….