Made in America

[Ozzie]

I make it a point to try and buy American. Every time I go in a store I'm on the lookout to find something made here...and it seems so much isn't already.

A very good example of this:
We were just down in Red Wing, Minnesota for a camping weekend. Red Wing is known for it's quality pottery and shoes.
DW and I went into town as we usually do on a camping weekend, our support your local community thing that we do.
We walked into an indoor mall. Red Wing shoes had a huge display of sale items, so I wandered over to take a look. $90 shoes for $40...wow...so tempting. I look under the tongue to see the size and guess what I saw. Made in China! What?
This in a town that was built on this product? How embarrassing...

We are giving our country away and nobody is stopping it.
What the heck can we do?

[richfaa]

I think I saw somewhere that there is no longer a shoe made in the USA. While wife was shopping a J.C Penny's I was looking a labels and found nothing made in North America.

[TheRanch]

There are many things still made in the USA. Retailers just dont stock them. They cant mark them up like they can the imported junk, consumers wont pay the higher price! Retailers wont take less profit and comsumers wont pay higher price! I could go on but Ill just leave it at that ya,ll know the rest of the story. God Bless the USA we need it.

[bigmurf]

quote:Originally posted by richfaa

I think I saw somewhere that there is no longer a shoe made in the USA. While wife was shopping a J.C Penny's I was looking a labels and found nothing made in North America.

I think SAS shoes are still made in Texas.

[Dustytuu]

My cousin worked over 30 years for Brown shoe company and it moved over seas. Everyone lost their job. Small town in Missouri. That really hurt that little town.

[simonsrf]

The businessmen, who made shoes here in the good ol’ USA, lost their companies because they couldn't afford the cost of the labor, the cost of mandatory medical insurance, the cost of union retirements, the state and federal employment taxes, and then the lawyers got in there and demanded their fair share to administer equal rights, worker safety, political correctness, diversity, and unemployment etc. etc.

What happened to those good old days when you could go find a different job if you didn’t like the current working conditions? We gave all of those jobs away to foreigners who were willing to produce at a cheaper wage; this is the unintended negative light of capitalism. We can't expect our current welfare recipients to work for the wages required of the company to be able to clear a profit. For most welfare recipients it is much easier to just sit on the couch and wait for the check to hit the mailbox. And if you are lucky enough to have more kids than you can afford, the check is bigger! What a country!

The solution might be that we can get a country to send us their undocumented workers to make our shoes. And, let's not tax these new hard workers because then we'd have to pay more for shoes…..not sure how we’d be able to pay for the enlarged infrastructure required to support the increased population. In fact, let’s not even require them to own a legal drivers license to drive a car on our highways; we’ll just pay for that with our increased taxes. Oh yeah, that’s the problem we have now, huh?

In 1973, in a foreign country, I paid $7 for a pair of sandals. I still have them, they are still good footwear, and I haven't even started to wear the tire tread off the bottom, but I still wish I could afford or even find a good pair of American made Red Wings!

[richfaa]

Bigmurf.. I believe you are correct,SAS( San Antonio shoes) are still made in Texas, I think..(I had a pair of those once) Our mail person has a pair and swears by them. He thought however that they had gone out of business. New Balance shoes started in the USA and has plants in the USA, I think, although they are a global company.

[bigmurf]

The New Balance shoes I had were made in China. Boots are still made in Texas too.

[ggranch]

An item in the Reader's Digest told af a Chinese lady that after years of living in the US became a citizen and was presented (by the Natualization Board) with an American flag. While admiring her new flag she spotted the made in China tag. Ironic isn't it. Bob

[adelmoll]

Ozzie, even the Minnetonka moccasin's that used to be made in Minetonka are now made in China but having been in retail I remember when Arrow Shirt Co. started to have their shirts put together off shore and the customers started to complain.. Arrow told us that if they continued to do the assembly in the US they would have to raise the price of the shirt from $32.00 to about $58.00. We asked our customers if they were willing to pay that for a shirt and of course they were not. At the time I remember thinking that the unions didn't really care about their workers.. They would rather have them not working then giving in to any of the negotiations. I'm not sure if that is the only reason but I do know that I would rather be working for minimum wages then not work at all.

Helen

[MacDR50]

We used to have a company in Canada called Sorel Boots. It went bankrupt in 2000. The Sorels you buy today are made in China. How many other products are sold under names/reputations that were built by domestic companies? My guess is many, that most of them chose to relocate and are still owned by people in our respective countries. Big business has no national boundaries. How much of our Montana's were made overseas?

[ols1932]

I'd like to buy everything American made however the prices dictate what I buy. If I find a foreign made item that will give me the same quality, I'll buy it. I'm not anti-American. On the contrary, I'm a typical, red-blooded, died-in-the-wool American. It's just my budget that dictates what I buy.

Orv