> The only difference? One was labeled “Made in Asia” and priced at $129. The other, “Made in the USA,” at $239. [85% more expensive]
> And many are willing to pay a premium for domestically made goods. Nearly half (48%) say they’d be willing to pay around 10–20% more. 17% say they’d be willing to pay ~30% more for an American-made product over an imported one. - https://www.retailbrew.com/stories/2022/07/28/consumers-will...
The article does not say how many would pay 85% more, but since the number more than halved from 10% to 30% more, I would hazard not many.
As a Canadian, "Made in the USA" is currently a mark against, and I would only consider buying that product if it was absolutely the only remotely reasonable option.
As an American, I’m doing what I can to boycott stuff made in red states. I can and do pay up to 2x more for blue state stuff (which is typically higher quality, to be honest), and go imported otherwise.
I will still buy American made stuff for sure no matter who is in power there. It doesn't matter to me. The quality of the product is what matters to me.
This article is completely non-rigorous and doesn't mean anything, but it shows what "simple" thinking about problems leads to. They would have had to gather enough data points to determine the price that people would pay to be meaningful in just about any way.
This is why it's important to have academic rigor and people who study specific problems deeply in positions of power. This ignores potential economies of scale cost reductions and paying more for home made products is circularly dependent on earning more from selling those higher cost products.
I think the most interesting question by far in this space is what percent of every purchase ends up going to housing, food, or health care. If you buy a burger, what percent of the cost of that burger is going directly into housing via the workers wages?
> to determine the price that people would pay to be meaningful in just about any way
Not convinced that would be meaningful, but even if it was, it'd be totally useless if you can't actually manufacture items in the US with less overhead than what this company managed.
Saying "people would have bought it if it was only 35% more for the same item" is not helpful if it's not possible to profitably manufacture them at 35% more than in China.
If the current policymakers are operating on vibes and simplistic reasoning, then it seems reasonable that this business merely refutes those vibes and misguided reasoning with simplistic evidence. They aren't presenting the post as a rigorous academic study.
The comment that users might see the US option as a scam is interesting. It would have been interesting to offer an info modal for the US item or ask for feedback from users who added the US item to their carts. Still not the rigorous study you seem to be expecting, but some extra info.
I wonder how valid that test is, actually. Lots of people are aware that claims of "Made in USA" often don't actually mean the thing was made in the USA in the intuitive sense of the phrase and so disregard them.
Regardless, I would fully expect that most people would be swayed by price, especially when the price differential is as large as in that test.
Disclaimer: I don’t think the current admin policies are a good way to bring back American manufacturing, if that is their main goal.
One point I don’t see discussed much is how American physical goods companies currently don’t really have access to the huge bottom chunk of the price pyramid. This limits the benefits of scale, and makes their products more expensive than they would be otherwise.
Right now if someone starts a small physical product company in America, they pretty much have to target people with excess discretionary spending ability. Once they go for the lower part of the pyramid that is much more price sensitive, they get killed by foreign competition on labor and environmental compliance costs that the American company has to pay and the foreign company does not.
If American manufacturing ever does come back, I would expect prices to come down significantly simply due to again having access to market scale.
In actuality the bottom chunk of the price pyramid being off limits is because of American business policy, not because of outside competition.
A staggering amount of Americans live around the poverty line and even more live paycheck to paycheck. They can only afford goods that are, effectively, priced at how much we value their labor in the US.
In order to solve this problem we'd need to actually raise the minimum wage and ensure Americans have more discretionary income to afford American products. But that'll never happen because businesses don't want to eat into their profit margins, so they just permanently lock themselves out of a market. It's a sort of tragedy of the markets issue.
another issue is that at least in the short term, the "made in america" sticker is likely to be detrimental in many foreign markets
so, it might make sense for US companies selling to US customers, if they can find suppliers. but even in the cases where it works for that market, multinational companies might prefer a "made in taiwan" or "made in mexico" sticker, or they might prefer to leave the sticker off
This is, of course, a puff piece of writing. You don't have to look further than this phrase: _"The new unit cost us nearly 3x more to produce. To maintain our margins, we’d have to sell it for $239."_
How else does 2x become 3x, unless you're trying to make your burden sound more dramatic. uug. But what interests me in this discussion is the phrase _"maintain our margins"_. American companies off-shored manufacturing to maintain their margins. Now they have a taste of that cheap foreign labor, its oh so difficult to come back cheerfully to manufacture in the US.
> "If policymakers and pundits want to rebuild American industry, they need to grapple with this truth: idealism doesn’t always survive contact with a price tag."
I suspect the vast majority of customers will go with the cheaper option, unless there's a quality advantage for the more expensive one (which I don't think there is in this case?).
There's also a difference between "made in" and "assembled in" in other cases (but not sure that applies in this case?).
I favor “made in [almost any OECD state]” (not just the USA) for goods I care about and plan to have a long time precisely because it’s a decent quality marker. It doesn’t make sense to shave a few pennies on materials and processes here and there when labor’s so expensive that you can’t compete on price anyway.
If you just tell me, or imply that, “these are identically made and QC’d, and made with the same amount and quality of materials, but made in two different countries” I’ll just take the cheaper one. Especially if the price difference is as large as in this experiment, JFC.
For garments at least, you _can_ have affordable, Made in US by unionised labour products [1], if you cut your margins.
People complain about CoGs but let’s be real, a lot of products imported have crazy margins put on them by the middleman. You’ve probably seen “I bought this off Alibaba for $.50 and reselling for $25”
It's not sincere. People in different countries do pay more for local, or ethically sourced, or other principled factors but it has to be a reasonable increase.
Putting a ridiculous, almost 2x raise in such a way and pretending it's a gotcha is disingenuous.
It's almost impossible to justify a significant percentage increase in price based solely on a questionable declaration of manufacturing location.
There should be a quality improvement that goes along with the location and price increase. And that used to be the impression, but I don't think that's the case anymore. "Made in the USA" used to mean that it was a quality product, not a cheap knockoff. Now the meaning is not so clear. Hasn't been for a long time.
The text says specifically that the quality is identical no matter where the product was manufactured. When people say they'd pay more for American made products, I think they mean it in the context of what that used to imply, not that they're going to pay nearly double for exactly the same quality.
> There should be a quality improvement that goes along with the location and price increase.
> what that used to imply
This last part hits the nail on the head. The quality difference is mostly a fantasy. While the long tail of random aliexpress/temu junk suggests there's some big quality difference, it's more that those are random small businesses operating without any regulations, reputational concern, or legal liability and incentivized to make stuff cheap.
If you think about the things most people buy from real brands, the quality argument against Asia is preposterous, since not only are the products made in Asia quite high quality, but America has essentially zero slack in the skilled labor market as it is. We literally could not build a device to the quality standards of Apple or Samsung because everyone in America who could conceivably do so already has a job building cars or specialized, very expensive industrial products.
Now, people do complain that everything is crappy and made to fall apart just as the 90-365 day warranties expire. But that's not China being too dumb to make it correctly -- it's made perfectly to spec most of the time. It's the designers of the products (often in the US) optimizing their profits by using the cheapest, worst parts and unrepairable designs. If anything, moving production to a high-labor-cost country would increase the pressure to cut any corner possible.
I don't understand why people are so incredulous that virtue signalling is rampant and even the "good guys" (whatever group you want to attribute that to) is mostly full of people who know the right thing to say, will gladly say it repeatedly to garner praise, but will not follow it when it comes to them.
Me, or anyone else who has tried a "virtuous venture", could have easily told this company not to waste their time. The take away here isn't "they screwed this up" or "This isn't a true test". The takeaway is "People are extremely self serving when the perceived impact is small and no one is there to judge them for it." Plan your business accordingly.
I absolutely pay more for local goods. In the grocery store I try to purchase things from my state, or at least adjacent states. If it’s something that will last for decades or something I will use constantly I will absolutely pay more for made in US, Canada or Mexico.
But, this study feels a bit off - as much as Americans aspire to be wealthy, the vast majority are not and have to make compromises and can’t always justify paying double for something out of some economic or emotional principle.
Of course, I learned a long time ago that “stuff” does very little for my quality of life so I try not to be acquisitive. Except for guitars, sigh.
This doesn't surprise me. As much as I would love to buy locally made products, in my economic condition I have to stretch my dollar as far as it can go. If it is the difference between buying a Dyson vs a XISXKE, well the Dyson is better for my money. But for the same shower head, that product will not scream quality unless I'm in the market to buy a higher end product. I may emotionally respond with, nobody else in the USA is supporting locally made products, why should I?
I will however go out of my way to buy Canadian over American out of spite.
Given how gutted the regulatory agencies are today, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see surge in fraudulent claims of “Made in USA” items that actually trace manufacturing to another country.
The choice between Made in Asia and Made in the USA can be more complicated. For instance, I will acknowledge that 85% of price difference is a lot, but then I'd rather own less stuff: less clothing, less food, certainly no goodie bags. If anything, I hate that the house is filled with stuff that family members bought for now good reason except this jolt of pleasure at the time of purchase.
The thing is, if made in the USA does not come with a better, greener or more ethical, who cares?!
Water filtration is an area where sophisticated customers want the best filter that meets usage requirements and budgets! If you double the cost, and there’s no extra quality improvement, you’re SOL.
also: proprietary in a shower head is at best some sort of activated charcoal plus some spices. I did some reading after my sister and her husband got an osmotic filter plus de fluoridation for their pending infants. The reading gave me the take away that for good filtration you have a tough time actually doing a good job unless you’re using an osmotic filter plus filter media where the water has a long dwell time. Some of this is touched on in a recent prject farm video. Point being a filter in the shower head isn’t doing much nor efficiently.
[+] [-] like_any_other|11 months ago|reply
> And many are willing to pay a premium for domestically made goods. Nearly half (48%) say they’d be willing to pay around 10–20% more. 17% say they’d be willing to pay ~30% more for an American-made product over an imported one. - https://www.retailbrew.com/stories/2022/07/28/consumers-will...
The article does not say how many would pay 85% more, but since the number more than halved from 10% to 30% more, I would hazard not many.
[+] [-] 0xTJ|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] hedora|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] dismalaf|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] matthest|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] mikrotikker|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] internetter|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] mvdtnz|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] HamsterDan|11 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] gaiagraphia|11 months ago|reply
I try to buy 'locally made' products because I respect the story of their company, and their efforts to build up some type of community.
If I had a choice between 'made here' or 'made there' at the checkout stage, then I'd probably think it's a bit of a scam.
I think 'locally made' is a business choice, not a product choice.
I always like to give this Welsh jeans firm as an example: https://hiutdenim.co.uk/ (sorry if it's advertising, I've no connection to them).
[+] [-] hayst4ck|11 months ago|reply
This is why it's important to have academic rigor and people who study specific problems deeply in positions of power. This ignores potential economies of scale cost reductions and paying more for home made products is circularly dependent on earning more from selling those higher cost products.
I think the most interesting question by far in this space is what percent of every purchase ends up going to housing, food, or health care. If you buy a burger, what percent of the cost of that burger is going directly into housing via the workers wages?
[+] [-] pixelesque|11 months ago|reply
Not convinced that would be meaningful, but even if it was, it'd be totally useless if you can't actually manufacture items in the US with less overhead than what this company managed.
Saying "people would have bought it if it was only 35% more for the same item" is not helpful if it's not possible to profitably manufacture them at 35% more than in China.
[+] [-] crusty|11 months ago|reply
The comment that users might see the US option as a scam is interesting. It would have been interesting to offer an info modal for the US item or ask for feedback from users who added the US item to their carts. Still not the rigorous study you seem to be expecting, but some extra info.
[+] [-] isaacremuant|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] arduinomancer|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] JohnFen|11 months ago|reply
Regardless, I would fully expect that most people would be swayed by price, especially when the price differential is as large as in that test.
[+] [-] pfannkuchen|11 months ago|reply
One point I don’t see discussed much is how American physical goods companies currently don’t really have access to the huge bottom chunk of the price pyramid. This limits the benefits of scale, and makes their products more expensive than they would be otherwise.
Right now if someone starts a small physical product company in America, they pretty much have to target people with excess discretionary spending ability. Once they go for the lower part of the pyramid that is much more price sensitive, they get killed by foreign competition on labor and environmental compliance costs that the American company has to pay and the foreign company does not.
If American manufacturing ever does come back, I would expect prices to come down significantly simply due to again having access to market scale.
[+] [-] fzeroracer|11 months ago|reply
A staggering amount of Americans live around the poverty line and even more live paycheck to paycheck. They can only afford goods that are, effectively, priced at how much we value their labor in the US.
In order to solve this problem we'd need to actually raise the minimum wage and ensure Americans have more discretionary income to afford American products. But that'll never happen because businesses don't want to eat into their profit margins, so they just permanently lock themselves out of a market. It's a sort of tragedy of the markets issue.
[+] [-] unknown|11 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] harrison_clarke|11 months ago|reply
so, it might make sense for US companies selling to US customers, if they can find suppliers. but even in the cases where it works for that market, multinational companies might prefer a "made in taiwan" or "made in mexico" sticker, or they might prefer to leave the sticker off
[+] [-] relaxing|11 months ago|reply
They didn’t bite.
[+] [-] xtiansimon|11 months ago|reply
How else does 2x become 3x, unless you're trying to make your burden sound more dramatic. uug. But what interests me in this discussion is the phrase _"maintain our margins"_. American companies off-shored manufacturing to maintain their margins. Now they have a taste of that cheap foreign labor, its oh so difficult to come back cheerfully to manufacture in the US.
> "If policymakers and pundits want to rebuild American industry, they need to grapple with this truth: idealism doesn’t always survive contact with a price tag."
Or, business' foreign labor priced margins.
[+] [-] pixelesque|11 months ago|reply
There's also a difference between "made in" and "assembled in" in other cases (but not sure that applies in this case?).
[+] [-] alabastervlog|11 months ago|reply
If you just tell me, or imply that, “these are identically made and QC’d, and made with the same amount and quality of materials, but made in two different countries” I’ll just take the cheaper one. Especially if the price difference is as large as in this experiment, JFC.
[+] [-] budududuroiu|11 months ago|reply
People complain about CoGs but let’s be real, a lot of products imported have crazy margins put on them by the middleman. You’ve probably seen “I bought this off Alibaba for $.50 and reselling for $25”
[1] https://ideologie.shop
[+] [-] pif|11 months ago|reply
People buy cheap. They don't buy quality, they don't buy local, they don't buy green: they buy cheap.
[+] [-] isaacremuant|11 months ago|reply
Putting a ridiculous, almost 2x raise in such a way and pretending it's a gotcha is disingenuous.
[+] [-] tejohnso|11 months ago|reply
It's almost impossible to justify a significant percentage increase in price based solely on a questionable declaration of manufacturing location.
There should be a quality improvement that goes along with the location and price increase. And that used to be the impression, but I don't think that's the case anymore. "Made in the USA" used to mean that it was a quality product, not a cheap knockoff. Now the meaning is not so clear. Hasn't been for a long time.
The text says specifically that the quality is identical no matter where the product was manufactured. When people say they'd pay more for American made products, I think they mean it in the context of what that used to imply, not that they're going to pay nearly double for exactly the same quality.
[+] [-] xp84|11 months ago|reply
> what that used to imply
This last part hits the nail on the head. The quality difference is mostly a fantasy. While the long tail of random aliexpress/temu junk suggests there's some big quality difference, it's more that those are random small businesses operating without any regulations, reputational concern, or legal liability and incentivized to make stuff cheap.
If you think about the things most people buy from real brands, the quality argument against Asia is preposterous, since not only are the products made in Asia quite high quality, but America has essentially zero slack in the skilled labor market as it is. We literally could not build a device to the quality standards of Apple or Samsung because everyone in America who could conceivably do so already has a job building cars or specialized, very expensive industrial products.
Now, people do complain that everything is crappy and made to fall apart just as the 90-365 day warranties expire. But that's not China being too dumb to make it correctly -- it's made perfectly to spec most of the time. It's the designers of the products (often in the US) optimizing their profits by using the cheapest, worst parts and unrepairable designs. If anything, moving production to a high-labor-cost country would increase the pressure to cut any corner possible.
[+] [-] drewcoo|11 months ago|reply
"Look for the union label" meant a lot to Americans back when there were unions.
[+] [-] devenson|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Workaccount2|11 months ago|reply
Me, or anyone else who has tried a "virtuous venture", could have easily told this company not to waste their time. The take away here isn't "they screwed this up" or "This isn't a true test". The takeaway is "People are extremely self serving when the perceived impact is small and no one is there to judge them for it." Plan your business accordingly.
[+] [-] apercu|11 months ago|reply
But, this study feels a bit off - as much as Americans aspire to be wealthy, the vast majority are not and have to make compromises and can’t always justify paying double for something out of some economic or emotional principle.
Of course, I learned a long time ago that “stuff” does very little for my quality of life so I try not to be acquisitive. Except for guitars, sigh.
[+] [-] T_Potato|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] T_Potato|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] xyst|11 months ago|reply
Maybe “Made in USA, China”
[+] [-] hintymad|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] mikewarot|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] oniony|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] carterschonwald|11 months ago|reply
Water filtration is an area where sophisticated customers want the best filter that meets usage requirements and budgets! If you double the cost, and there’s no extra quality improvement, you’re SOL.
also: proprietary in a shower head is at best some sort of activated charcoal plus some spices. I did some reading after my sister and her husband got an osmotic filter plus de fluoridation for their pending infants. The reading gave me the take away that for good filtration you have a tough time actually doing a good job unless you’re using an osmotic filter plus filter media where the water has a long dwell time. Some of this is touched on in a recent prject farm video. Point being a filter in the shower head isn’t doing much nor efficiently.