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Every single one of these articles are missing an element that I believe will prevent US production from ever returning: the supply chain is way longer from US

Every single one of these articles are missing an element that I believe will prevent US production from ever returning: the supply chain is way longer from US -> US than it is from China -> US. This sounds absolutely absurd, I know, but it is the truth. If you go to China, you can practically buy direct from many factories, or you can go through a broker who actually does know the source factory. This does not happen in America, at least in my brief experience. I used to be responsible for finding US sources for certain products. If you aren't aware, you'd think that the price of a US-made product is 10x that of China, when in reality, it is just the supply chain that is 5 people deep, but only if you really work at getting it that low. The amount of "middle men" is absurd. I reversed engineered quite a few supply chains, and even managed to get in contact with the source, but there I was blocked. I had to go one person higher, but that person refused to speak to my company. I then had to go one person higher, and they refused to talk to me. I ultimately ended up going up 5 levels away from the source, but even that is not a chain, but more like a web. If I was able to buy from the source, or even two levels away, the price of the products would be cheaper than China. The final slap was that the person I finally managed to get a "yes" from was not willing to work with me unless I worked specifically on their terms. I won't go into detail, but their term was 100% unreasonable. The fact is that the supply chain in the US is far to complex and it is based on protecting profits. US-made items are not inherently more expensive than Chinese products, but even those with clout have to deal with long response times and an ever-growing web of middle-men. Simply hiring a Mandarin speaker to call China is far quicker and easier.

TheCowboy 14y ago
Would you mind elaborating and specifying which industries or resources you experienced these problems? This sounds like something that a startup could target.
- dizzystar 14y ago
  I would say look up consumer-plastics, like high-quality cups and pens. I'm not talking about the use once and toss away stuff: think Tervis-style items or things made with tritan. It gets considerably more complex if you only target items that are eco-friendly, then add in imprinting and the world gets exceptionally complicated. Another issue is mold-creation, which is separated from manufacturing in many cases and also very expensive. The piece-counts are usually tolerable. The fact is that China can do custom molding much cheaper and many US companies refuse to do it at all. I've also discovered that many companies will straight-up lie to you about USA-made items as well. The company I worked for recently caught one person lying about this stuff, so there's that element as well.
mgkimsal 14y ago
I worked with a manufacturer back in 2005-2007, and kept in touch some with the next dev on their development efforts. The company spent a lot of time and money dicking around with developing some custom ecommerce stuff, tieing in an ordering system to their customer service dept, etc. Then they'd show it, have meetings, make changes, etc. Did this for multiple years. And made a handful of sales. Why? Because they never promoted it (either under their own name or another). Why not? Because they didn't want to 'upset' their current channel partners. But they'd investigated direct sales for a few years because the channel wasn't delivering. Absolutely ridiculous, and it would not surprise me one bit if I could call China and order the exact versions of what they made and have them shipped to my house faster than ordering from this company in Chicago. I'm not suggesting all companies are like this by a long shot, but I've seen inside more than enough to understand just how inefficient many companies are, and this idea of 'protecting' the supply chain will be a pretty moot point as it becomes easier and easier to order direct from alibaba vendors and have things shipped over in days vs waiting for the appropriate field-sales-marketing-division-exec-vp-manager to fire up their outlook and hunt-and-peck a typo-laden form letter complete with out-of-date brochure/price-list.
- dizzystar 14y ago
  I had to deal with the same issues as well. Protecting the supply-chain is priority one in the industry I used to work for, but the fact is that the internet exposed the entire industry for the BS protection mechanism it is. What happened is that the distributors decided to go past the suppliers and order direct from China, which they couldn't do even 5 years ago, but the suppliers, if they ever went direct to the end-user, would get tarred by the entire industry. It didn't stop here. End-users would contact the suppliers, who would uphold the honor and refer them to distributors. The end-user would say screw that and order direct from China who couldn't care less about what American companies think. I don't want to specify what industry I used to work in, but that fact is that this old-world ol'boy protectionism is destroying America's ability to re-enter manufacturing. The sick part is that there are entire regulatory bodies protecting the supply chain. Unfortunately, politicians either don't know the truth, or really can't be expected to explain all of this to the general public. Of course, the politicians will be incorrectly blamed for not bringing jobs back to America, but the reality is that this all has to change from within the industries who are destroying themselves.

TheCowboy 14y ago

Would you mind elaborating and specifying which industries or resources you experienced these problems? This sounds like something that a startup could target.

dizzystar 14y ago
I would say look up consumer-plastics, like high-quality cups and pens. I'm not talking about the use once and toss away stuff: think Tervis-style items or things made with tritan. It gets considerably more complex if you only target items that are eco-friendly, then add in imprinting and the world gets exceptionally complicated. Another issue is mold-creation, which is separated from manufacturing in many cases and also very expensive. The piece-counts are usually tolerable. The fact is that China can do custom molding much cheaper and many US companies refuse to do it at all. I've also discovered that many companies will straight-up lie to you about USA-made items as well. The company I worked for recently caught one person lying about this stuff, so there's that element as well.

mgkimsal 14y ago

I worked with a manufacturer back in 2005-2007, and kept in touch some with the next dev on their development efforts. The company spent a lot of time and money dicking around with developing some custom ecommerce stuff, tieing in an ordering system to their customer service dept, etc. Then they'd show it, have meetings, make changes, etc. Did this for multiple years. And made a handful of sales. Why? Because they never promoted it (either under their own name or another). Why not? Because they didn't want to 'upset' their current channel partners. But they'd investigated direct sales for a few years because the channel wasn't delivering. Absolutely ridiculous, and it would not surprise me one bit if I could call China and order the exact versions of what they made and have them shipped to my house faster than ordering from this company in Chicago. I'm not suggesting all companies are like this by a long shot, but I've seen inside more than enough to understand just how inefficient many companies are, and this idea of 'protecting' the supply chain will be a pretty moot point as it becomes easier and easier to order direct from alibaba vendors and have things shipped over in days vs waiting for the appropriate field-sales-marketing-division-exec-vp-manager to fire up their outlook and hunt-and-peck a typo-laden form letter complete with out-of-date brochure/price-list.

dizzystar 14y ago
I had to deal with the same issues as well. Protecting the supply-chain is priority one in the industry I used to work for, but the fact is that the internet exposed the entire industry for the BS protection mechanism it is. What happened is that the distributors decided to go past the suppliers and order direct from China, which they couldn't do even 5 years ago, but the suppliers, if they ever went direct to the end-user, would get tarred by the entire industry. It didn't stop here. End-users would contact the suppliers, who would uphold the honor and refer them to distributors. The end-user would say screw that and order direct from China who couldn't care less about what American companies think. I don't want to specify what industry I used to work in, but that fact is that this old-world ol'boy protectionism is destroying America's ability to re-enter manufacturing. The sick part is that there are entire regulatory bodies protecting the supply chain. Unfortunately, politicians either don't know the truth, or really can't be expected to explain all of this to the general public. Of course, the politicians will be incorrectly blamed for not bringing jobs back to America, but the reality is that this all has to change from within the industries who are destroying themselves.