Everyone Says They’ll Pay More for “Made in the USA.” So We Ran an A/B
Everyone Says They’ll Pay More for “Made in the USA.” So We Ran an A/B
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Everyone Says They’ll Pay More for “Made in the USA.” So We Ran an A/B
20 comments
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Id pay more to get a made in China product. I do BDS on the US.
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I straight-up wouldn't trust a digital storefront that says "made in america". And even if it was true I wouldn't expect them to be honest about the profit margins and stuff. Especially when they're like "oh we got both."
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Reminds me of the wild gap between approval ratings for returning manufacturing jobs to the U.S. and the percentage of people who say they'd take one of those jobs when polled.
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TBH I think that's the wrong takeaway. That polling result showed something like 25% of those polled would want to work in a factory if they could. If that result were valid for the entire US, that would be something like 50 million (out of ~210 million working age). For reference, peak manufacturing employment in the US was in the late 1970s with around 20 million people working in manufacturing out of ~110 million working age.
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The problem is that there is a reality between people who claim to want to take those jobs, and the real actual jobs that exist on a modern factory floor. I need to keep reiterating this to people because the propaganda is so thick, but there are manufacturing jobs in the U.S. the problem is that most of them are third shift and under some pretty shitty circumstances even for factory work and they don't pay near equivalent to what they did in the 70's, none of which is solved by 'bringing manufacturing jobs back'. The problem is what first world people want for 'factory work' fundamentally does not exist under global capitalism, even if it is still a pretty easy way to make some decent money if you can hack it.
As I keep telling people irl, bringing jobs back is admirable, we should be producing closer to our areas of consumption, but who is going to work them if we can't fill the lines on the factories we already have?
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Ahhh that's a much higher number than I remember. I stand corrected.
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That’s… you realize not everyone only wants jobs to exist because they want the job themselves…. Right?
Like I’m pretty sure everyone would agree we need garbage trucks and janitors but boy do I have a surprise for you about how many would take those jobs.
Really we need public works projects, like nationalizing the internet and paying to expand access to it instead of allowing ISPs to gouge the fuck out of everyone for years. But I mean, manufacturing also probably would not be bad so we can be less reliant on people we like to try and piss off.
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tldr: the price for the usa made shower head was $110 more expensive than the Chinese made version, and literally no one bought the usa one.
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This is capitalism action, baby. You can talk all you want about wanting some artisanal handcrafted product but the ability to produce commodities cheaply and sell at the lowest price is a big part of what pushes capitalism forward.
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Development of productive forces is what pushes history itself forward. It's a good thing. Not unique to capitalism.
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- loves a deal
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I think there is an obvious problems with this "experiment", namely that paying an extra $100 for the shower head won't give extra money to American workers but the business owners. It's literally just some bourgeoises asking you for free money and making it incredibly easy for you to just, not pay it.
Meanwhile, the existence of charity as a viable system disproves the idea that Americans are unwilling to part with their money to help other Americans.
If these guys had promised to spend all the profits from their margins on the made in USA products on actually helping workers/ ordinary Americans instead of keeping them for themselves, they might have actually seen some sales.
20 comments