Ben, when I was at the Kirby factory with the VCCC in 2014 celebrating Kirby's 100th Birthday, we took a tour of the factory. The tour guide that works for Kirby was taking us around the factory for a tour and at one point he was saying that all the parts on the Kirby were made in America. At one point of the tour I spotted a bunch of stacked boxes and you can clearly seen they were Chinese built, they had that cheap China looking cardboard, so I questioned him about what was in those boxes and he replied, good eye, those are cords, yes, they were from China but they were not really used in production. He said they had three vendors make cords for Kirby and that they do not put all their eggs in once basket so to speak, if something happens with a relationship with one of the suppliers or if there is a run of defected cords they always have a back up. I found that very smart and very interesting. I remember when I was a Kirby Area Distributor in the late 70's and 80's, the plugs were different on various shipments of machines, especially the Omega's, they had various cords on them, at one point they actually reduced the length of the cord to 20 feet instead of the normal 32 feet because of energy crisis of the 70's.
