Recently I was quite delighted to find out that galaxus.de has a "country of origin" filter. The delight quickly faded when I realized that it was quite unreliable, e.g. one size of a USB stick was made supposedly made in Germany while another was supposedly made in China (which I found quite unbelievable). To be fair, they do write "Specifications may include unverified machine translations."
Does anybody know of a (tech or other) online shop where this works? Or tipps how to quicker navigate real and fake/mistaken "country of origin" labels?
Maybe country of origin refers to the company that assembled the final product (or labeled some generic product with their brand, or designed but not manufactured it or...).
Correctly labelling the country of origin for produced, physical goods is hard, as often there are so many components from all over the world on a product.
Galaxus on their website: https://www.galaxus.at/en/page/transparency-regarding-countries-of-origin-34177
But unless the majority of value was added in branding for some variants, I don't understand why the 64GB variant of https://www.galaxus.de/en/s1/product/goodram-ume3-usb-30-128gb-eco-friendly-128-gb-usb-a-usb-memory-sticks-17543048 is "made in germany" while the 128GB is made in China.
So I assume their "machine translation" hallucinates at some point.
One could argue, that the majority of value is probably in the flash chips and/or flash controllers and as such the country of origin is probably always Taiwan (or another Asian state)