Buy American, or not

My wife and I stopped at a thrift store last week to see what movies we could find on VHS for our four year old. We picked up E.T. and The Jungle Book and on the way out Elliott found a box of Play-Doh molds and tools for three dollars that he couldn’t live with out so we brought that home as well.

 Elliott discovered he only had one tub of Play-Doh left that he hadn’t turned into snakes and balls or let dry out in other undefined forms so Ruth promised to get him more Play-Doh when we passed by Hobby Lobby on the way home. I would have thought Hobby Lobby carried Play-Doh. They don’t, but they carry Kiddie Dough. At home, Ruth helped Elliott with the packaging and noticed that when Elliott started to play with the stuff it was sticking to his hands like green pizza dough with too much water. She thought maybe there was something wrong with the green so she tried the other colors; nope, they were a sticky paste just like the green. My daughter Googled “Kiddie Dough” and discovered broad dissatisfaction with the product. I took a look at labeling on the box; it was a Chinese product made in China by a Chinese company.

Ruth and I operate a vending cart where we sell inexpensive handmade jewelry and accessories. We make a lot of the handicrafts ourselves, resell some items made by local artists, and buy imported handiwork as well. We have an opportunity to get a sense of the general public’s attitude toward imports compared to American-made products. Many people like buying hand crafts from the person who created them, but others don’t care; if they want something, they’ll buy it without considering its origin. Very few are the people who have rejected an item because it was handcrafted overseas.

 As consumers, we shouldn’t be uncaring about where the products we purchase are made and we shouldn’t be so isolationist and naïve that we think everything we buy can or must be produced in the United States. We should at least give some consideration to the origin of a product when we buy it. I would say if you have the money to support the American worker when you make a purchase to go ahead and do it. I would also say to not buy a cheap Chinese knock off of a longstanding American product like Play-Doh. If Hasbro decides to have its Play-Doh produced in China to its specifications, the decision to purchase it becomes a bit more complicated. Most of your dollar for the product probably stays in the United States. It goes to pay for the heat and lights of the store where you bought it; a portion of it covers store clerk salaries, shipping, other overhead, advertising, profits for shareholders in an American company, etc. At most, a few pennies of that dollar go to China. Some of those pennies probably even come back to the United States to purchase products made in America.

At our cart we sell a beautifully hand-beaded necklace from Guatemala for $12.00. I’ve had people who do beading stop at the cart marvel at the work and say if they were to make such a piece they’d have to sell it for $80 to cover their time which means a store would have to sell it for around $150 or so. The necklace is nice, but I can’t imagine anyone forking over $150 for it. The person who produced the piece in Guatemala most likely receives less for the piece than the sales tax on the $12.00. He or she is at least able to eat and purchase other basic needs that might not be possible to buy if the necklace couldn’t be brought to market at a price people would be willing to pay. Again, I wouldn’t begrudge a few cents leaving the country in return for the amount of commerce it creates at home and to allow a family in another country to at least subsist it might not otherwise have an income.

There are many products we buy that have greater utility than a bead necklace. Let’s consider an iron. My household doesn’t iron much any more, but it seems we have to buy an iron every couple of years. We’ve tried various brands and features with prices ranging from $15 to over $100; most have them failed long before they should have and  we wished others would have failed because of problems we had with them. Our current one often snags the clothes on its trailing edge, has a setting dial that is very hard to turn, and will randomly leave a trail of water on the clothes that has to be ironed over to evaporate. If the irons were made in the United States, I don’t think it would make any difference; wherever they are produced they are being made to the specifications of American product engineers. We have the same issue with toasters. My grandparents had the same toaster all of their adult life and throughout their retirement, and they made toast every day. We’ve gone through several toasters that seem to start failing soon after we take them out of the box. On all these types of products, paying a higher price doesn’t mean it is higher quality, it just means there are more features that will eventually fail. I’d pay triple the price if the company could say it’s the last one I’ll ever need to buy and it is going to work just how it should. These products are designed so that we have to keep replacing them. Assembling them in China just makes it easier for us to keep doing it. We don’t complain so much if we have to go out and buy another $30 toaster, but if the same toaster were made in the US and cost $90 we would rebel.

 I personally avoid buying most food products from China. All those unregulated factories keeping costs down are polluting the air, the water, and the soil. I’d like my apple sauce to be made from apples grown in Washington or Michigan instead of the Yangtze River basin. I don’t know what possessed me to buy frozen salmon in Walmart once but since I noticed it was from China I’ve left it in the freezer, now taking up space for several months.

We live in a global economy and if we want a global market for our products we need to be willing to buy from other countries. I suppose we could refuse to buy any foreign products but I surely the result supply and demand for the hand to produce them would drive the prices up incredibly; we’d probably all have to stop our loftier pursuits and get a job on an assembly line because we wouldn’t have enough hands to produce all the things we buy. So, I would think twice before buying, willy-nilly, fake Americana knick-knacks or Kiddie Dough from Hobby Lobby; we don’t need that crap. I don’t want to pay $2000 for an iphone; I’m OK with it being made in Longhua. I don’t want to have to get a second job on the toaster assembly line because we don’t have enough people to make them. I’d like to think that as a nation we’ve progressed beyond competing for mindless low-wage assembly jobs. Maybe someday, those jobs will come back, but that will when China and India have moved past us and we become their cheap labor. We already have to bring in scientists, engineers, professors, and doctors from other countries because we aren’t educating our citizens well enough to take those jobs. We should be educating our population for middle or upper tier careers, not lamenting the loss of the bottom tier drudgery.

 The toaster, iron, or computer speakers are inexpensive because they are made in China; they’re cheap and disposable because American companies design them to be that way. If we want the products to be better we need to boycott them by not handing our money over to buy them, not because they’re made in China but because they’re designed to be junk. Meanwhile, I need to mix together some flour, water, salt, and food coloring to make Elliott’s play-doh.