Keith Milne
By Keith C. Milne
A couple of days ago, I found myself-once again-huddled over a large box on my living room floor that contained a new bakers rack. The box came with markings and words in English, Spanish, and Mandarin written on the various sides of the box and, once opened, revealed the usual cavalcade of different sized bags, all either displaying a large number, or letter, or both, two more hex wrenches to add to my collection from previous, similar purchases, a mini Philips head screw driver, a multi-page, multi-language book of instructions amounting to a zillion pictures with arrows and tiny words that referenced a page to go to to for deciphering. For the duration of the assembly process I had to constantly flip back and forth between the page I was on for the current step in the assembly, and the page identifying or uncovering the mysterious instructional reference. So annoying!
Every time I find myself in this situation I can hear the little voice in my head whispering “so much for buying local,” or “so much for buying made in the USA.” I feel guilty about it every time it happens! For decades I’ve been going through this, and always wonder WHY THE THINGS I BUY CANNOT BE MADE IN THE USA AND PURCHASED ALREADY ASSEMBLED! Well, of course they can, and believe it or not, almost everything used to be made right here in the USA.
Back in the 1980’s during the Reagan years, big steel, textiles, and most of America’s manufacturing sector learned they could vastly increase their profit margins by moving their operations overseas. One by one, these huge companies moved mainly to China, Indonesia, United Arab Emirates, Vietnam, South Africa, and Mexico and cut their labor costs ten-fold, more than enough to be able to ship products made in these countries back to the USA and still make more than they used to when they made them domestically.
I remember this time well. It was horrible watching the the news at night with lots of stories about massive layoffs and rising unemployment, and it was all about letting a renewed laissez-faire economic model dominate unchallenged enough to be prevented, and the practice was being allowed by Republican politicians who were influenced and monetarily rewarded for looking the other way and buying into the ridiculous experiment now famously known as “Trickle-down-economic-theory.”
For those of you who are just now hearing or reading this term for the first time, trickle down economic theory essentially posits that the wealthy at the top, or the owners of the means of production, should enjoy huge tax breaks and tax cuts because doing so would allow them to be able to expand their operations, and increasing the amount of available jobs. When those jobs that are created are finally filled, and the workers are all being paid a living wage (which rarely ever happens), they would spend that money, further stimulating the economy, allowing for more further expansion, and job creation, and an overall better quality of life for those who live in the country under this economic model.
Well, that didn’t happen. And, until we restart these manufacturing companies domestically, or force American companies back to the USA by removing any incentives they have for keeping their operations overseas, we are going to be stuck with the situation we find ourselves in right now. This means that, most often, most of us will continue having to buy a boxed version of a displayed item that we see online or at a big-box retailers like Home Depot, Lowe’s, Walmart, Amazon, and Target, and then either lugging “the box” home or waiting a few days and having “the box” delivered so we can open it and begin the often confusing, daunting process of assembling the item, with instructions inside ranging from unusable to barely comprehensible. Isn’t it fun!?!!
Not only is buying and filling our homes with items that come like this unnecessary and ridiculous, there is also a whole host of other, equally annoying things that accompany this model of consumption, such as the sheer volume of garbage generated by all of the packing materials, often coming with lots of hard to deal with, and environmentally challenging materials, like styrofoam sheeting, styrofoam peanuts, or other non-recyclable plastics and strange materials of questionable composition. Additionally, the weight of some of these items are well beyond some peoples’ capabilities to move or lift them, and the boxes also offer buyers a serious theft potential as they sit on porches waiting for their buyers to come home, often under the watchful eyes of your very own local neighborhood porch pirates.
I don’t like any of this at all. I never did! I think that it is terrible and criminal that companies think more about their bottom line than the health and well being of their own country and the people who work, live, and reside there! It’s despicable that they move their companies overseas while creating manufacturing ghost towns all across the land! Who the hell really wants to buy boxes shipped from halfway around the world and assemble all of their own stuff all the time anyway? Not me! I’m tired of making things easy for companies that charge me more while giving me less so they can make increasing profits!
Buy anything in any of the above mentioned stores or Amazon.com and 90% or more will be made in China! I don’t care what it is, when you find the label, 90% of the time that’s what it will say. If you’re a little like me, you want to have the choice to support your country and support your fellow workers by buying what they make. We keep hearing “Buy Local!,” “Buy American,” well, how about making it here so we can! We cannot buy made in the USA if it’s not made here or if your company is still over in China or some other country.
The perception about the quality of the manufacturing of goods took a nosedive when Japanese goods flooded our country back in the 1970’s, especially in the automobile industry. Once companies started leaving in the 1980’s the actual quality really seemed to go down fast. It was almost as if American firms that had pulled up stakes and reset over in China now had us all conditioned by the Japanese goods, so they began flooding our stores with “made in China” goods, and little by little the Chinese goods took over and began to dominate our markets and stores and became what we had available to buy–take it or leave it.
It seemed like virtually overnight we (Americans) all had to adjust to more and more goods that can best be described as flimsy, lightweight, and very cheaply made, and were most often made almost entirely in plastic, which is now a HUGE environmental concern as the tonnage of plastics clog up our landfills, end up becoming part of one of the six known ocean trash gyres in the world, or become new plastic once recycled.
Unbeknownst to most, China forced our companies to give up their manufacturing secrets in order to be able to do business there, and now in 2023 China is a super power, just like us, and bigger than Russia! China is now emboldened and feeling very strong these days. For quite awhile now, they have been the second biggest holder of U.S. debt, manufacture about 90% of all the computer chips we need and consume (and we invented semi-conductors), and make 65% of all products consumed in the United States, and that number goes higher when you factor in that many goods made in America contain many parts made in China! China is currently responsible for one third of all manufacturing output WORLDWIDE. Like any other authoritarian regime, China wants to own the world! They want to be number one, and they want to own everything, and tell everyone what to do, and when, and how to do it!
I have vowed to really try a lot harder to find American made goods and services I can afford and have been willing to pay more for that privilege for quite some time now. I buy American as often as I can. The future health of our country depends on it. When I cannot find an American version of what I think I need, I vow to just try doing without or figuring out a way around my perceived need for said item or service!
I grew up BEFORE we in America had grown accustomed to being able to enjoy immediate gratification. The “everything we want, the way we want it, right now” kind of mentality also began in earnest during the 1980’s. This immediate gratification era coincided with the CEO’s of America’s largest companies all seeming to want to make even more profit than they already had during the time period they manufactured their goods in the United States.
During this same time, with that kind of thinking prevalent, cocaine and meth-amphetamine use rose to historic levels, the same for illicit gambling, and the purchasing of very expensive fashions-even for men, excessive spending, excessive everything became THE WAY back then, and all the permutations and twists and turns and damage thereof have been born out of that time and since then.
And now we consumers are all buying big boxes full of parts, and hard to read instructions about how to assemble our “needed” item made in China, while China supplies Russia with technology on one leg, and supplies us and the rest of the world with our future landfill problems to pay for their upcoming takeover attempt on the world. Brilliant!
Essentially, we are paying an authoritarian regime to make stuff for us that widens the socioeconomic gap between the haves and the have-nots, while giving up our technological and manufacturing know-how, funding the spread of authoritarianism, and filling up our landfills and adding to the volume of trash and toxic waste in the world, while also simultaneously ensuring that our own workforce is lacking in the skills that will be necessary to bring these companies and their manufacturing back to the U.S.. Fantastic!!
I have always objected to our manufacturing going anywhere but my own country and backyard! I could see this train wreck coming all those decades ago, just like so many of my brothers in the workforce in the 1980’s and beyond. Stupid, greedy, short-sighted, lying managers and CEOs who laughed all the way to the bank while they lowered the power, safety, and economic security of the USA!
Slowly, but surely, Americans have lost traction and become sub-par to most of the rest of the developed world, not only in manufacturing, but in healthcare, infant mortality, and the average mortality age of adults living in this country. This is the first time these health indicators have all dipped in decades. America really has, for the first time in quite awhile, significantly slipped down the list of industrial and developed nation rankings at almost every level, and has slipped significantly farther into the abyss of unnecessary obsolescence because of the greed of a handful of people over the last 40 years!
NO MORE “MADE IN CHINA” BOXES!! It’s time for all of our knowledge, money, and good wages to return to this country and stay here. It’s time to re-skill our workers and ensure that we have plenty of folks who can code, develop software, and engineer it all into robots, AI, and all of the other vast, new, technologically advanced things our nation of can do, and will do.
Corporations need to come home permanently! Thank goodness, under the Biden Presidency getting the historic “Chips and Science Act” passed adds economic burdens to companies wishing to remain overseas, and adds incentives to bring them home! It’s about time, and just in time!
I think once we get smart and come home for good, that the future will not only give us workers with advanced technical knowledge and know how, but will also give us shelves, and cabinets, and furniture, and products that are already assembled or require minimal setup for a change, because they won’t be brought to America in a container ship from China.
Maybe, just maybe, that shelving unit in the future will be made right in your town and can be delivered whole to you or put in the back of your car or truck and taken home fully assembled like things used be. What a concept! The biggest difference for the future will be that, while our goods will most likely be “Made in the USA,” they won’t necessarily be made by a human being!
It has become almost impossible to find just about anything that doesn’t come from China!! It’s the first thing I look for so I can try to avoid purchasing goods from China. Whenever it’s made in China it’s almost guaranteed to be inferior quality. This goes across the board whether it be clothing, appliances, furniture. I have noticed especially when ordering online the descriptions of the items are very deceptive. It will say it’s real leather when it’s not or solid wood when it’s particle board. The parts don’t match or line up when trying to assemble and you’re trying to read instructions that obviously were written by somebody without a command of the English language and often don’t make any sense at all. I’m sick and tired of it! I try to boycott anything made from China if at all possible but it’s getting harder and harder to do so. Come on America wake up! Let’s demand goods and services made in our own country and be willing to pay a little higher price for better quality and jobs for our own country.
Yes it is hard to find made in USA goods. I’m hoping with our recent developments with China that a renewed interest in bringing our manufacturing home for good will really take hold. I’m hopeful that will be the outcome. Late this year or early next year might be a really good, even historically a great time for buying domestically and for buying domestic stocks!! 👍🏻