BS! Your school may not have had a class, but in every school system I taught in, it was a required course and I often taught it.
Which is why people started to shop more off of price than quality or where things were made.
Hell, even the Unions saw this trend starting decades ago. I know most will not know of these, but these were once staples on US television.
Of course, the ILGWU vanished over 25 years ago. And the "Inspector 12" became pointless when over a decade ago they closed the last 30 of their US factories and moved them all to Asia.
This is not "corporate greed", it is called "fighting to stay alive". When people started to only shop based on cost and nothing else, they had to do the same thing when it comes to labor.
And what happened to the companies that tried to buck that trend? Who instead raised prices in order to keep working in the US? Well, look no farther than Magnavox, RCA, Quasar, and all of the other former electronics companies we once had. Either bankrupt and bought out by foreign companies (Magnavox is now owned by Phillips, RCA is owned by Sony), or just completely out of business (Quasar was bought by Panasonic then closed).
You say you laugh, but you seem to have missed how economics really works. It is not the company that dictates things, it is the consumer. And I started to see that trend in the early 1980s, as people started to shop based more on price than anything else. Who cares if the $100 Korean VCR only had 2 heads and might break down after only 3 years. It was cheaper than the $200 4 head US made one that would last a decade or more.
Which is now why we have TV sets that last a decade if you are lucky, and is cheaper to just throw them away instead of fix them. Which also had the effect of destroying another longstanding US industry, TV repair shops.
I even see that in my industry, as today few even consider fixing their computer. Our population has moved to a disposable mindset, predominantly because of the low cost of goods that they dictated. To the point that nobody wants to even pay for local domestic labor, just throw it away and buy a new one. You can't blame that on "greedy corporations", a great many are not even around anymore and have not been for decades. This the consumer has entirely done on their own.