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It's not obvious that transportation and quality assurance are cheaper overseas. At this point, China has grown its manufacturing sector so much that it's poten

by xmprt 5y ago

It's not obvious that transportation and quality assurance are cheaper overseas. At this point, China has grown its manufacturing sector so much that it's potentially better than the US in many ways (as far as QA goes). And for transportation, economies of scale mean that it's potentially cheaper to ship a massive container of good to a common port instead of having to hire trucks for each of your factories. I'm not saying that either of these claims are true, but it's not clear that they are false either.

kennywinker 5y ago
The shoes are not all consumed in LA or whatever port city they land in. They go on trucks from there to all the smaller cities. Unless for some reason you need to have many factories spread out to produce what was made in one factory in china (seems unlikely, but for some product this will be true) you have the same shipping logistics except for the big container trip from china and the trip from the port to your distribution center.
- sjwalter 5y ago
  There's a certain large detail elided by this, which is basically the experience of opening up a container from China. When you're doing any kind of non-trivial amount of manufacturing in China, you've got a chain of exporters and workers behind you that specialize in making the un-containering experience fantastic. As in, the standees of celebrity endorsers holding the shoe in their hand for the merchandising station are manufactured right across the street from where the shoe is actually made. The box company making the box are very close by as well. And then even the guys loading up the cargo are making it so it can basically go onto a container in China, go to a warehouse in LA, and be shipped over to Helena, MT, and have six or seven large cardboard containers all slide out of a twenty-footer, then the truck driver is on to the next shoe store. ALL that labour of packaging and boxing and merchandising all happens at basically starvation wages for poor Chinese. It's not JUST making the shoes, it's making the shoes, making the boxes for the shoes, making the merchandising for the shoes, and packaging all that shit together in a container-friendly way that is also friendly to unboxing by American minimum-wage workers. The "supply chain" is about much more than just the contents of the box, but about the entire chain it takes to get to retail.
  - baybal2 5y ago
    I doubt that even packaging would be that expensive. I myself ran warehousing, and packaging operations in Richmond, BC, Canada with local labour, packing bulk headphones, and USB chargers. It takes 20 seconds to unwrap a heaphone, and nicely pack it, or 40 seconds on average if you account for people not being robots, and making breaks, going to bathroom. You get around 500-600 packed headphones per worker, per day. If you pay CAD $120-$140 a day (back in days when CAD was > USD,) it's just ¢40-¢50 per pack if you ad for other employment expenses. Easily, easily doable for a product selling for $30, whole costing near nothing in parts, and materials.
- shalmanese 5y ago
  There's an underappreciated aspect of domestic manufacturing which is that it makes supply chains simpler. In China, it's not uncommon to order direct from the manufacturer. Someone at the factory will hand your order direct to China's equivalent of Fedex and it will arrive at your front door 3 days later. Containerization forces the insertion of middlemen. Someone is in charge of breaking down a container and then storing it in a warehouse with a bunch of other products that can all get shipped at once to a consumer. The hidden tax from so many more people being involved in the supply chain is underestimated by a lot of people.

by xmprt 5y ago

kennywinker 5y ago

The shoes are not all consumed in LA or whatever port city they land in. They go on trucks from there to all the smaller cities. Unless for some reason you need to have many factories spread out to produce what was made in one factory in china (seems unlikely, but for some product this will be true) you have the same shipping logistics except for the big container trip from china and the trip from the port to your distribution center.

sjwalter 5y ago
There's a certain large detail elided by this, which is basically the experience of opening up a container from China. When you're doing any kind of non-trivial amount of manufacturing in China, you've got a chain of exporters and workers behind you that specialize in making the un-containering experience fantastic. As in, the standees of celebrity endorsers holding the shoe in their hand for the merchandising station are manufactured right across the street from where the shoe is actually made. The box company making the box are very close by as well. And then even the guys loading up the cargo are making it so it can basically go onto a container in China, go to a warehouse in LA, and be shipped over to Helena, MT, and have six or seven large cardboard containers all slide out of a twenty-footer, then the truck driver is on to the next shoe store. ALL that labour of packaging and boxing and merchandising all happens at basically starvation wages for poor Chinese. It's not JUST making the shoes, it's making the shoes, making the boxes for the shoes, making the merchandising for the shoes, and packaging all that shit together in a container-friendly way that is also friendly to unboxing by American minimum-wage workers. The "supply chain" is about much more than just the contents of the box, but about the entire chain it takes to get to retail.
- baybal2 5y ago
  I doubt that even packaging would be that expensive. I myself ran warehousing, and packaging operations in Richmond, BC, Canada with local labour, packing bulk headphones, and USB chargers. It takes 20 seconds to unwrap a heaphone, and nicely pack it, or 40 seconds on average if you account for people not being robots, and making breaks, going to bathroom. You get around 500-600 packed headphones per worker, per day. If you pay CAD $120-$140 a day (back in days when CAD was > USD,) it's just ¢40-¢50 per pack if you ad for other employment expenses. Easily, easily doable for a product selling for $30, whole costing near nothing in parts, and materials.
shalmanese 5y ago
There's an underappreciated aspect of domestic manufacturing which is that it makes supply chains simpler. In China, it's not uncommon to order direct from the manufacturer. Someone at the factory will hand your order direct to China's equivalent of Fedex and it will arrive at your front door 3 days later. Containerization forces the insertion of middlemen. Someone is in charge of breaking down a container and then storing it in a warehouse with a bunch of other products that can all get shipped at once to a consumer. The hidden tax from so many more people being involved in the supply chain is underestimated by a lot of people.