For a long time it was very confusing. During the 80's and 90's, for the reasons above, Fender produced guitars in a lot of different places. Quality was sometimes shoddy, sometimes spectacular, especially some of the Japanese product. There was even a time when Fender made no guitars in the US at all!
The American stuff is nice, now. Actually worth the money. Solid bodies, and they've gone back to sounding like Fenders. For a long time they made an effort to kind of "mainstream" the sound of their instruments, and cut costs by making guitars with laminated bodies. The American Standards to me were the epitome of over-priced, crappily built, bad sounding Fenders. Like I said, the new American Series stuff is nice. And the offshore stuff is way more consistent.
If you like it, buy it. Like C7 said, don't listen to someone who doesn't carry the line. Dissing something you don't have to sell something you do is a classic salesman technique. Fender definitely plays hardball with it's stores(they can be bastards, actually, kind of the Microsoft of the music industry) but it's been a while since QC was an issue.
And no matter what you buy, if you don't know how to do it, have a guitar tech set it up. Sometimes they will do it at the store for free, but with big stores you generally get what you pay for.
