In contrast to the swift shutdown in Memphis and the rapid exodus of consumer electronics from Camden, however, Bloomington's television production simply drifted slowly away. "I think the first move was to Tennessee in a very small way," said the RCA worker Elizabeth Shelton in 1979, "but the rumors started as long as twelve years ago that eventually RCA in Bloomington would be reduced to just more or less a shipping point or a final assembly [operation]. And it all happened gradually over a ten-twelve-year period." Although marked by occasional large-scale layoffs, the decline in receivermanufacturing jobs took place over the course of a generation as employment reductions combined with the early retirement of workers to eliminate 7,000 positions between the late 1960s and the mid-1990s. Judy Cross explained, "We had eight thousand people working here and all the chassis went .... [Then] we lost our tuners, we lost our pre-amp, we lost our remote control." Even after the television chassis started arriving from Mexico in the mid-1970s, the Bloomington workers at least performed the tasks of attaching equipment to the core of the set, but then the chassis began arriving in Bloomington with all the components already in place. In sum, according to Sandy Anderson, rather than laying everybody off at once, "they just sort of snuck it out one line at a time." The Bloomington workers were actually more fortunate than many U.S. workers in the consumer electronics industry, for RCA kept some production in the country longer than many of its competitors did.