> The trees and the people/machines are right next to each other. And still we can't make the economics work. That's because the economics are a scam. Trade dea

> The trees and the people/machines are right next to each other. And still we can't make the economics work. That's because the economics are a scam. Trade deals, subsidized shipping, state sponsorship from China. You can't compete on wages when everything is asymmetrical. That's not the primary problem. The primary problem is "customer service" and that means that there is NO middle market in anything. There is cheap, high-volume crap optimized to the penny with no customer service and there is fully-custom, super expensive high end stuff with great customer service. Fixing any complaint or fault is expensive if you're not in the high-volume camp. If you're in the high-volume camp you simply say "We'll comp you a new one" and you're done. If you're in the low-volume camp, to fix things, you're rolling a human to make sure something is broken and worth fixing. With furniture, maybe you have to roll shipping. Then you have to do the fix. And then you have to roll it back. At the end, that's probably $500+ for furniture. If it's really bad, you're sending a whole new thing ($2K+). Did you make enough profit on your other sales to compensate for that? This "missing middle" due to customer service is the bane of everything right now. It even infests high tech stuff like test instruments. There are $1K or less things with no customer service or $100K things with great customer service and excellent quality. However, the $5K-$10K things get squashed.