Lots of people do. But it's not just 20%. Newp, I see many, many American-made goods at twice the price of imports.
I can get a dozen import LED bulbs for the price of one American-made bulb, and the American-made doesn't have the added features of the import. I'll be replacing my import 75W and 100W incandescent bulbs (which the US doesn't even make any more, and is phasing out) in my outdoor fixtures with import 15W LEDs. Most of my indoor lightingis already CFL and LED. I've had nothing but trouble from the FEIT brand CFLs, and it's a US company. I bought a dozen Chinese ULA CFLs in
2004 and 7 are still running. Chinese SATCO CFLs have outlasted all my Feits, too, and they're half the price from local sellers. I have dozens of other examples to soothe my "import buying" guilt.
Hey, WalMart happens to be the largest employer in the USA, behind the gov't.
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"According to data from our suppliers, items that are made, sourced or grown right here in America already account for about two-thirds of what we spend to buy products at Walmart U.S. But there is room to do more."
Not true. Boycotting can work, too. That's non-violent.
That's good news, but contrary to what you read on the web.
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The whole article is worth a read. It's on the internet, so it must be true...
Buying billions of goods that weren?t made in America.
The vast majority of merchandise Walmart sells in the U.S. is manufactured abroad. The company searches the world for the cheapest goods possible, and this usually means buying from low-wage factories overseas. Walmart boasts of direct relationships with nearly 20,000 Chinese suppliers,[iv] and purchased $27 billion worth of Chinese-made goods in 2006.[v] According to the Economic Policy Institute, Walmart?s trade with China alone eliminated 133,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs between 2001 and 2006 and accounted for 11.2 percent of the nation?s total job loss due to trade.[vi] But China is hardly the only source of Walmart goods: the company also imports from Bangladesh, Honduras, Cambodia, and a host of other countries.
How does that work? If you can't afford the foreign stuff, what are you gonna boycott? And what will you buy instead with the money you don't have?
Maybe they do not have to eat -- or put it another way, we will not feed them. Then the dumbest half of people will die off, then a half of what remained, as the robots get smarter.
The concept that Chinese goods are inherently cheap junk is silly. the Chinese are as capable of producing good stuff if required.
Chinese art, for example, is well into the top end of the art market with 1st, 2nd and 6th place in the top prices paid in 2011.
Cummins Diesel started producing some of their smaller 6 cylinder engines in China in 1995 and produce engines that are as good as any that they build anywhere. They also have a factory in India a country not noted for excellency either :-)
The Walmart example above is largely at fault for the concept that all Chinese goods are shoddy - "The company searches the world for the cheapest goods possible". If your overwhelming requirement is "Cheap" then it is highly unlikely that you will be purchasing "quality".
03:56:18 -0500 typed >> >> > If robots can sell coffee machines I think that they can probably say,
decaster missed this bit of news from 2012:
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"According to Momentum Machines, making burgers costs US$9 billion a year in wages in the United States alone. The company points out that a machine that could make burgers with minimum human intervention would not only provide huge savings in labor costs, but would also reduce preparation space with a burger kitchen replaced by a much smaller and cheaper stainless-steel box." [...] "This self-contained, automatic device sees raw ingredients go in one end and the completed custom-made burgers come out the other at the rate of up to 400 per hour. "
So, yes, there is no humanoid looking robot flipping burgers and asking "Do you want fries with that?". Nope - just a machine which makes hamburgers to order.
Oh yes, and while we are at it - the "Barista In A Box": which features a kiosk at the University of Texas Austin, which in fifty square feet of floor space (five by ten, or 4.6 sq meters), does everything - and repeats the process, so that your order today is the same as yesterday, as the day before, as it will be tomorrow. "High-end restaurants automated coffee production and no one noticed."
The robots are here, and they don't take breaks, come in late or hung over, require medical benefits or overtime. And the price of these robots is coming down, as their abilities increase.
-- pyotr filipivich "With Age comes Wisdom. Although more often, Age travels alone."
What a great idea! It would double the average IQ of the USA within a week! Alas, as we saw in Idiocracy, "they" tend to constantly multiply. "Hey, let's water the fields with Gatorade!"
Millions of items are no longer made here because they weren't profitable enough. Figure that into your agenda.
Is the data actually that, or are they leaving out the fact that manufacturers stopped building those things here and have all outsourced for profit, eliminating their costly union-overpaid employees? It's probably somewhere in the middle, don't you think? Besides, globalization will happen now that the Djin is out of the box.
Yeah, since most clothes, appliances, electronics, etc. aren't even
-made- in the USA any more, that's bound to happen.
If you're not buying anything, you have no reason to boycott anyone. Ask Obama for your rent money, honey. (Or get a job.)
Humanity will eventualy evolve into cybernetic organsims, this has already begun. Defects in the current design of humans will be eliminated over the next few centuries. Life spans of several millinia will become a reality.
Never implied otherwise. There's no reason that the Chinese can't make stuff as good as anybody else.
There are two pieces to this puzzle. First it's the American consumer. I want low cost stuff. When I have my thinking cap on, I consciously buy Harbor Frieght tools because they're the cheapest around and will likely last as long as I'll need to use them. For something I will use a lot, I avoid HF like the plague. Used to be that you could go to Sears and be guaranteed quality. Today, you're likely to get the same junk as you'd get from Harbor Freight.
My problem is that I sometimes misplace my thinking cap. I've been known to spend $3 on gas to get to a store where I can save $2 on an inferior item. It's logically inconsistent, but much buyer behavior is illogical.
My egg frying experience improved dramatically when I bit the bullet and bought a $12 spatula instead of the 99-cent ones. Whoodathunkit? Only took me 60 years to figger that out.
The second piece of the puzzle is that there are places in the world where working long hours for low wages is far superior to the alternative. American workers won't. They've got the "dole" to fall back on and it's better to do that than to work for low wages. Third-world workers are glad to have the jobs we don't want. It's not anybody's fault but ours.
All WalMart does is put the buyers and sellers together. Buyers want cheap. WalMart gives it to us. Boycotting Chinese junk doesn't help anybody. Nobody's gonna start up an American factory to build flashlights that Harbor Freight will put in your hands for free. Even if you buy a "quality" flashlight, it's likely made elsewhere.
The same thing happens with quality goods. If the Chinese will make 'em at lower delivered cost, who's gonna get the build contract? As long as our tax, import tariff and foreign/domestic economic policies don't change, we're gonna continue to export jobs. And you can't fix that because any effective change would precipitate trade policy retaliation that would being the whole system to its knees in a heartbeat.
Boycotting works when the boycotting inflicts pain on the supplier AND you have alternatives AND they have the means to meet your demands. You DON'T. They DON'T. Putting a Chinese flashlight manufacturer out of business, even with the arrogant assumption that we could do that, doesn't help anybody unless some American factory springs up to supply the demand at a price we'll pay. American workers won't stand for the wages and conditions required to make that happen. It's more likely that we'd attract yet more illegal immigrants and make the problem worse.
The thing that upsets me is that there's nothing I can do. Even if the fairy godmother waived her wand, eliminated the grid-locked thing we call congress and gave the reigns to the best economists, there ain't much they can do. In the world of instant communication and container ships, isolationism is unattainable. That ship has sailed...probably the same one that brought you tennis shoes and computer tablets from some sweatshop abroad. If you can't do that, you're stuck with the inevitable equalization of the world standard of living. The American standard of excess is not sustainable...except among one-percenters. And those guys hold the reigns.
I haven't worked in almost 20 years, but I'm watching my friends get downsized and the remaining crew becoming more and more like the sweatshops of the third world as almost every manufacturing function gets offshored.
Would you vote for significant price increases to have more production return to the states? The "haves" won't. And the "have nots" don't have the clout or the money to buy 'em. And the main result would be higher prices and profits for the Chinese vendors.
If WalMart ceased to exist, the overall American standard of living would decrease. We'd be able to afford less stuff.
It's not anybody's fault. It's an economic reality that can't be fixed. Bend over and kiss your sweet ass goodbye.
Precisely. I refuse to pay 9x the cost to buy the same Chiwanese crap from an American business that I can buy direct from China with free shipping and handling thrown in. It allows me to buy more import clothes, which aren't made here any more.
Since HF, Costco, Trader Joe's, Target, Sasco Fasteners (1/3 Home Depot's prices), and are all in Medford, I wait until I have needs to shop in at least 3 of those before I make the 60 mile round trip. It works just fine to amortize the extra cost. Oh, there are branches of my bank and Fred Meyer there, too, so I can gas up, buy food, and bank on that trip, too, instead of going the opposite direction into Grants Pass. I time the circular shopping path with lunch so I can get a fabulous Polish dog at Costco for $1.50, as well. This limits me to one trip every 1-3 months.
And I bought a $450 Makita plunge saw with extra 55" rail to take the place of a table saw in the field so I can make precision cuts. It outperforms a circular saw by 1000%. HF tools for simple daily use, so I can afford more tools, but decent tools for the harder tasks or use-100-times-a-day tasks, where they're needed. Value.
Precisely.
I misread your first posts. Apologies.
We need to continue to develop things which need to be made here. I wish both Big Business and CONgress would realize that if we export the entirety of our manufacturing centers, we're completely at the mercy of external supports for our continued existence. We're on the edge now.
We're not even watching visas to catch the overstayers, and we're allowing them to drive, vote, and elect our corrupt CONgresscritters nowadays. Shit, our infamous Governor Kitzhaber even designed a new law to give KNOWN ILLEGAL aliens our best price for college tuition! Obama is giving illegals free passes into the US, while allowing their entire extended families the same pass. By 2025 (oops, rescan: 2043 now), the majority of people in the USA will be hispanic. (Is anyone cutting buttons out of their skivvies yet? They won't allow the same mercies on us white folks.) We're knowingly self-destructing. Merry Suicide, folks! What used to be a Melting Pot is now large and angry groups of illegal aliens, talking in their own tongues, all plotting our destruction. What fun!
Sucks, doesn't it?
We need to refocus. CEOs and Gov't need to downsize and tighten their belts. 70% of our gov't could go away and the only thing most people would notice is that there were fewer taxes imposed on them. Folks who pay more attention would notice that there was no more deficit and the debt would be getting paid off. If CEOs and upper management didn't get such huge wages + bennies, and meetings weren't held in Hawaii or Bali or Paris, the price of blurfls would drop immensely and people would have a real choice of Buying American.
Too bad we can't outlaw attorneys. Think of the cost savings to the American people if _that_ were to happen! Nightmares would decrease.
Exactly. Millions more would be out of jobs, too. What I don't understand is how unemployment bennies got extended year after year. It's a crutch, not a damned way of living. (Ditto Welfare. Whatever happened to Workfare?)
We need to reset our entire way of doing things. If not, bend over.
Yabbut, what do art buyers know?
Too bad they didn't focus on "value". Too many Americans are geared to glitz and gizmos. Telephones do NOT need to be turned on 24/7 nor do they need to perform over 400 tricks, thankyouverymuch. And look at the bloat of operating systems. Christ, it takes a GB or 2 just to _load_ any more! Basic apps take 400MB, fer Crom'ssake. Buy a clue, folks!
That's OK. Besides being great with a bow, she's hot! Speaking of which, my ex-BIL left a 75# pull compound bow in my sister's garage rafters and I find my name attached to it. I'm the only one who can pull it -and- it's left-handed. Win/Win, wot?
(For those of you in Rio Linda, that's "Dirty Old Man Grin")
I think you guys are 'way too pessimistic about the American economy, and 'way too optimistic about the Chinese.
This is a long story, but the Chinese have been too slow to adopt international standards of quality -- sewing a straight line on a Louis Vuitton handbag is not a measure of manufacturing quality. And now they're facing much higher transportation costs and a steep rise in wages, with the Lewis Turning Point looming ahead. Like the Japanese before them, they're losing their edge on cost, but without the Japanese reputation for quality.
I talked with a Chinese representative of their tool-and-die industry in Atlanta last month. I asked them if they could make decent D2 steel yet. "Just barely," he said. Which puts them at a competitive parity with the West...in about 1950.
The long-term goal for China is to be globally competitive at competitive, not cut-rate, prices. They're hoping to accomplish market-share inroads before their costs rise too much. So far, they're not doing very well at that, in automobiles, industrial equipment, and so on. There are factories in China turning out good products but they're almost always run by Western companies, who are putting up with horrible productivity in order to gain the labor-cost savings. That will go away. Now their goal is to ride it out as the Chinese domestic consumer market expands. Their economy *must* become more consumption-based, or they're going to lose much of their export market as their costs increase.
Meantime, US manufacturing has settled into a low but sustainable percentage of our GDP. It's projected to grow in dollars, and slightly in percentage of GDP, in coming years. The rest of our economy is perking along mostly on services, and the labor-multiplier effect of manufacturing is sufficient to sustain pretty good growth.
Our economy is doing well. It's employment that's at risk, largely because of steady improvents in our productivity -- read "automation." This will become a bigger social problem and we will have to address it. But the solution will be much happier than you guys are imagining. There is nothing in the economic dynamics that suggest we're going to become a third-world country.
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