This strikes me as a naive way to think about pricing (though it's probably consistent with the way finance people think about it). The only reason to charge that same ~4x markup on the additional labor cost is to keep gross margins (as a percentage) unchanged, but that would actually increase profit (as a dollar amount). If you just want to keep the same profit you'd get from offshoring, you can probably increase the price by much less - $13 if demand were perfectly inelastic, somewhat more in practice.

Also, that sentence shifts from cost per hour to cost per pair without an explanation. Is 1 pair/worker/hour a realistic estimate? That seems way lower than I'd expect. Surprisingly I couldn't find a good answer to this in 30 seconds of searching.

After learning how many manufacturers essentially use slave labor for their products, I've stopped buying clothes manufactured outside the US and EU. I'm sure there are better ways to do this, but that's the simplest reliable one - even e.g. Patagonia, which seems to be trying its best to maintain an ethical supply chain in developing countries, has had its share of issues. The price difference hurts a little bit when I actually make a purchase, but clothes are cheap enough to begin with that the difference ends up being a pretty negligible piece of my overall spending, probably something like $100/year on average.

I did some work with manufacturers who were in the process of moving manufacturing overseas some years ago. From my experience, the way the article presents the issue is detached from what really happens.

For instance, people look at a labor difference of $3 and $12, and assume that if these things were manufactured in the U.S. they would cost five times as much. But the thing is, labor is just one part of the cost. You also have things like R&D, advertising, raw materials, transportation, machinery, the cost of the manufacturing plant, etc. Some of those (like advertising) are going to stay the same no matter where you make your product, some would probably cost less overseas (real estate needed for factories), some would cost more overseas (transportation cost). There are also other issues that come up (like quality control issues) that come up when moving operations overseas that can be quite costly.

Here's the thing, though - let's say that a manufacturer makes a product for $10 and sells it for $12.50 - they're making $2.50 per unit sold. Now let's say that moving things overseas, when everything is taken into consideration, they can now make a product for $9.50, of which they keep 25 cents and pass the remainder 25 cents forward. Now they've increased their profit 10%, which is pretty big for them.

But what about the consumer? For simplicity, let's say that the 25 cents goes directly to them and the middlemen don't take a cut. And let's say that the final retail price doubles (the results would be even more extreme if they quadrupled like the article says). So the price goes down from $25.00 to $24.75 - they save 1%.

Now, obviously things are a lot more complex, and things are going to vary greatly depending on what's being manufactured. But from my experience, moving manufacturing overseas can often be profitable for companies while being only negligibly beneficial - or even detrimental (for instance, with poorer quality control) - for the consumers.

When products are not fully vertically integrated, and there's a large markup dowstream, the upstream manufacturing is highly incentivesed to "penny pinch" in a way that would be perceived to be highly counter-productive in an integrated organisation.

The example that first made me notice this was power management in server systems. If you're running $100K worth DBMS software (licenses) on a $100K box, all of which has a further $10-100M of web apps and systems relying on it, then it would be madness to throttle that CPU to save $50 in electricity annually, right?

Well, guess what: most places do this! It happens because they outsource the low-margin upstream component (colocation/hosting/cloud), and when you're a data centre provider living on thin margins, the cost of power / cooling can be very substantial relative to your own costs. If you rent the rack space for that server out for $500 per annum, that $50 of electricity is 10% more in your pocket! That's a big deal!

Meanwhile, that $50 saved has slowed down $100M worth of stuff, sometimes by 50% or more. But... that's not the hosting provider's problem.

(PS: Azure does this, and they don't let you turn it off.)

Provided their clients don't figure out what's going on and move to another provider. If the client has millions of dollars riding on that infrastructure, they'd likely be doing enough performance-monitoring to notice this kind of thing, no?

> Azure does this, and they don't let you turn it off

Azure really don't offer any never-throttled instances? What about their dedicated hosts?

I'm always pleasantly surprised when I see power management correctly configured at a client precisely because it is so rarely done correctly.

Even if cloud vendors do fix this one thing, there's about a dozen more such issues where the suppliers' interests don't line up with the downstream consumers' interests.

> Azure really don't offer any never-throttled instances? What about their dedicated hosts?

I don't believe so. For example, their highest performing single node is the HBv3, with 2x AMD EPYC 7V13 processors for a total of 120 cores / 240 threads.

On this page: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/work...

There is a box that says:

    Nodes per Socket (NPS) = 2
    L3 as NUMA = Disabled
    NUMA domains within VM OS = 4
    C-states = Enabled

Let's say I have Linux instances in the cloud. What would be the steps to take for proper power management?

I'm not sure calling C-States throttling is completely accurate, at least not in the way that you imply.

Modern CPUs have multiple mechanisms that can be called throttling in some way, but C-States are the least offensive and in modern CPUs actually increase performance.

There's a good basic explanation here [1] but in short :

- C-States is about idle cores, and powering them down. You can actually configure how deep you can power them down. Waking up does have a tiny cost in latency, yes, but it's mostly irrelevant (your core spends most of it's time waiting for data).

- P-States are what I would call "ok" throttling, those happen when non-idle, modern cores can scale their frequency up and down based on how much workload they have. Again, in theory purely about power saving and close to 0 impact on performance.

This was simple, and used to be just about power saving, disabling was ok. But things changed massively about 10+ years ago with the introductions of various Turbo mechanisms.

Turbo is about looking at your CPU as a whole (and not per core), and maximising performance of the loaded cores by pushing their frequency, using the power budget that used to be allocated to the idle cores (that are now powered off).

The way its done is by adding a few extra P-states that push the frequency a few hundred MHz. The more "C-State-down" cores you have, the higher the frequency of the working cores is pushed.

Extreme example : you have a 28 cores CPUs running a single thread workload on one core only, with 27 idle cores. With C-States disabled, you lose Turbo and are stuck with the single core running at the "non-Turbo" frequency. With C-States enabled, because you idled the non used cores, your working core gets higher clock speeds and higher performances.

(Things get more complex with AVX2 because those units have a large power consumption, and this is where you get into the very bad throttling)

[1] : https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/blogs/c...

I have run many, many tests on real-world workloads, not artificial 100% loads of either a single core or all-cores, as you typically get in benchmarks. In all cases, disabling C-states made overall performance at least 20% better, and often 200% better (3x faster)!

There's lots of reasons for this, and I could write pages and pages on how the jitter introduced by the sleeps is murder on TCP throughput, or how the frequency ramp up time is glacially slow, or how most servers are idle most of the time and only the cold-start latency matters to end-users. Then I could keep ranting about the waste of it all, and go on and on about how Californian greenie hippie morons tried to save the planet one database server at a time. Then finish up by showing that 10 Gbps Ethernet's latencies interact with the core sleep timings just so to make things as bad as possible.

But instead of taking my word for it, you could just do your own tests on your own software, ideally in a production system involving n-tier networking instead of some isolated, synthetic benchmark.

PS: By design, power management has no impact on anything running at 100% load for extended periods, so no synthetic benchmark will ever show any impact. That's precisely why very few people are aware of the issue...

As far as I can tell, very few people ask similar questions. Those who do, come to interesting conclusions: https://jan.rychter.com/enblog/cloud-server-cpu-performance-...

"There. I've said it. These [Xeon] processors are slow. Dog slow, in fact."

My gimmick recently has been to upgrade Intel CPU VMs to AMD VMs. One benefit of the cloud is that this is literally just a menu selection. If it was on-prem, it would be a one-month argument to convince people that it's risk free, then a one-month argument with some beancounter, then a month of waiting while the pallets of kit ship in from Asia, then another two months of rack mounting and prepping for production.

"They let them pack lots of slow cores onto a single CPU die, put that into a server, and then sell twice that number of cores as "vCPUs" to us."

Azure also charges for licenses on a per vCPU basis as if* they were physical CPUs! This means that in effect they've doubled their Windows and SQL revenue stream.

I agree with your overall description - I believe economist describe problems of this sort as externalities[1].

The example of externalities that comes to mind is shipping companies running absurdly large ships to shave margins and so being concerned that their behemoth might lodge in the Suez Canal and disrupt much of world trade.

IE, producers not being concerned about the larger impact of their decisions.

But your example leaves me scratching my head. My impression is that cloud providers effectively selling CPU cycles by the dollar. There must be some pricing tradeoff for fast versus slow cycles. If a cloud provider can sell 20 throttled instances cheaper than 17 unthrottled instances, that's a deal that might suit buyer and seller.

But maybe there's something I'd missing here.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

Getting them from China was not only cheaper but (to my surprise) faster and better. They got knowledgeable QA people that understood how EU countries need different tweaks, and they got anything we needed done quickly. Shipping was fast enough, and all in all, they just provided a much better and more affordable product than any country in the EU could have done.

It might be different for products that are very innovative, (most shoes aren't), but in that case maybe you can travel to China for a month and iterate quickly with the factory people.

But if you want plastic trainers, no doubt they make the best. I think it's just a simple case of doing a lot of it, specialising, getting good at it, as it would be anywhere. China now has more PCB fab know-how, equipment, people, etc. than anywhere.

I'm not saying that either of these claims are true, but it's not clear that they are false either.

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.

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.

Edit: I think we can see huge companies tightly locked into their paradigm because it involves so much capital and so many connections to suppliers etc.

For a while, but your competitors will do the same, and unless there's a cartel, one of them will pass all the savings on to consumers, and the rest will follow.

Private companies, of course, have more leeway.

Note this does NOT include indirect labor (skilled trades), salaried employees, or the time taken to make the parts installed at the assembly plant (engines, transmissions, bolts, glass, etc)

"Indeed, many of the remaining 200-some U.S. footwear factories serve the military, said Tom Capps, whose Capps Shoe Co. in Virginia mainly makes uniform shoes for the government."

Thats 200 sources of American-made shoes. The quality is not bad in the ones I have owned. The US government is probably getting better quality and value from its contractors in shoes than it is in, say, software, including "cloud services". :)

Patagonia used to source fleece from Malden Mills, a US manufacturer. Malden Mills, now Polartec, is a government contractor so maybe that has helped them to remain in business.

https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences-and-law/economi...

Shoemakers are already charging what they believe to be the highest price they can regardless of costs. They don't believe they can raise the price, or they already would have.

The highest price you can charge for shoes made in China is different than that of shoes made in the USA. Whether or not it's enough to support a market is a different question, but it's an undeniable difference.

Personally, I'm willing to pay around 2X to get American made goods, and routinely go out of my way to do so.

Unfortunately, the consumers who matters is the rather less well off one who is making decisions based on how much money they have in their bank account today. A number which is rarely large, if the stats are to be believed.

I agree with the sentiment. But I'm overpaid. Most people aren't willing to double their expenses on something because they want to support a political outcome. They would quickly run out of money.

It's the reason why so many products advertise 'sustainability' or 'fair trade'. It differentiates the product. I was trying to make the general point that how items are produced does actually matter to consumers, and a large population are willing to pay for moral manufacturing, myself included.

On Nike's side, I see it at pure greed.

For what they charge, they could pay an American Worker $40/hr, plus medical? (Yes--I pulled that $40 out my arse.)

My sister has two shoe stores in LA. She made everything here prior to Covid.

She paid her employees $10/hr, and offered zero benefits.

Pre-covid she was a multimillionaire.

(To anyone selling a craft, don't skimp on stuff people throw away, like bags, tissue, fancy price tags. It's about branding. Oh yea, sometimes the higher the price--the more they want it. My sister is a cutthroat businesswoman. I always knew she would be wealthy. She's not a great person though.)

Not sure what sneaker heads have to do with anything, as they are not a meaningful portion of the broad market for shoes.

Nike has a ~10% profit margin, and that would be a liberal definition of pure greed, relative to other businesses’ profit margins. Especially considering they have no lock in or moat for their product other than people’s individual desire to buy them.

They pay for the hype not for the quality.

Is it really possible to make anything that isn't a product of the global economy?

When something is labeled as "manufactured in the US", I always thought that was a term of art that meant final assembly.

It is said that around 1/5 of the world's cotton comes from forced labor. This has been reported on by the BBC and The Guardian.

More seriously we have a bunch of clothes makers here that makes cloths 100% made in France (incl material). linen is one of the trick they use. Another is recycled materials. One of them makes a jeans made out of plastic from the sea, which (sadly) we can harvest abundently here :)

That's interesting, why is it so concentrated? Is it subsidized heavily?

https://www.peclersparis.com/en/blog/will-linen-spun-in-fran...

It says "We’re committed to using American-made materials from the cotton we source and the suppliers we work with to the hangers we use in our Detroit storefront."

https://gettees.us/pages/materials

They are not claiming that anything other than materials of which their products are made is made in America. Other things are needed for a business, like buildings, machinery, tools, computers, food, fuel, etc. Maybe these are not defined as "supplies", but they are part of a chain of necessities to produce the products.

I also don't see them claiming that their suppliers have US-based suppliers, and their suppliers' suppliers, and so on. That is what I would think a "chain" is, since normally chains have more than one link. Talking about all the different suppliers being in the US is one single link.

They say: " "Assembled in the USA” isn’t enough "

So, instead of taking one step, they are taking two, and calling it a marathon.

Semantics aside, I think it makes sense to focus on the labor standards around the harvesting of raw materials and the manufacture of the products themselves for two reasons. First, I assume that they're the most labor-intensive parts of the process. If you amortize the amount of labor needed to make a computer or industrial sewing machine (including mining the raw materials) over the number of articles of clothing they can be used to make, I bet the amount of labor used per end product is pretty negligible. Obviously I'd prefer if that labor isn't done by enslaved people, but I'd rather prioritize the more labor-intensive components. Second, my impression is that the clothing industry is distinctly awful with respect to the amount of slavery and sweatshop labor in its supply chains. Lots of the building materials, machinery, and food, and fuel used and consumed in the US are produced in the US to begin with. Food production in developing countries often uses slave labor, but at least there are reasonably effective ways to avoid that (e.g. by buying fair trade products). I'm sure the mining of raw materials for US-manufactured equipment often relies on slave labor, but again, I'd expect that's far less labor-intensive than food or textile production. Conversely, manufacturing clothing is highly labor-intensive, and when that labor occurs outside the US or EU it's pretty much guaranteed to be performed by people who are literally or effectively enslaved.

I'd love to support businesses whose operations are completely slavery-free, But I'm not sure that's even possible at this point - slave owners seem to have a monopoly on semiconductor manufacturing, for example. And I worry that too many people let perfect be the enemy of good, and throw up their hands and do nothing as a result.

The true reason has to do with use of capital. The US has perfected a system where capital is highly rewarded for pure financial operations: stock market, futures speculation, banking, real state lending.

Manufacturing requires a lot of capital that US players don't want to tie to a lower reward structure. Germany and Chinese capitalists are completely Ok with employing their capital for manufacturing for political/structural reasons.

That's why American economists will make thousands of excuses that really make no sense when it comes to the fact that they want to invest as little as possible in manufacturing.

They make a fortune with the cash they get at the tills (net-0) before they pay it to their suppliers (net-60, net-90).

[1] https://manufacturingglobal.com/procurement-and-supply-chain...

Even Switzerland has a number of mass market shoes companies with 100% of manufacturing inside the country. And Swiss manual labour salaries are out of this world.

The problem is Americans suck at doing business: lack of entrepreneurial spirit, creativity, wits, and grit. A universal solution of overcoming adverse conditions: "exit, and sell."

I worked in OEM manufacturing my whole career, soon to be 10 years of full time work. Every time I hear we get a big new buyer, and he/she is American, I feel joy, and dread at the same time.

Joy, because big American companies are as a rule well moneyed. Dread because there is so much truly unnecessary tedious work, and ceremony with them.

Once upon a time, a buyer demanded our "risk management," and "crisis management plan," I dropped from a chair laughing.

Any problem faced by a big company is solved by throwing consultants, and attorneys at the problem, which don't solve anything 9 out of 10 times.

You should probably stop buying clothes made in the US then. A lot of clothes are made by prison (very nearly slave) labor.

https://laborrights.org/in-the-news/your-valentine-made-pris...

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/16/the-chinese-wo...

https://archive.is/Kwt7u

you don't understand finance, and why it has to work the way it does, hence your naive thinking :)

when a manufacturer sells a product to a distributor, the mfr ships the goods but they don't get paid right away, they get paid later. Invoices are marked "net 10" or "net 30" or "net 60", where the numbers refer to how many days the buyer gets to pay the bill after receipt of the goods. (length depends on your credit worthiness and potentially the goods in question, dairy for example is perishable)

And the same goes for the distributor selling those same goods to the retail merchants. (and, with credit cards, the same goes for the consumer buying the item)

but let's go back to the mfer above: they've sold the goods, but they haven't been paid... and they still need to manufacture more goods to have on hand for the next order that comes in, and they need to keep paying rent on the factory, and they can't just lay off all the workers till the money comes in and then rehire them, and they don't want to tell new customers to wait for their orders.

So the manufacturer has to buy more raw materials and keep the lines operating. So they go to the raw materials suppliers and say "hey send us more stuff, so we can manufacture more, we promise we'll pay you later" and the raw materials supplier said "you said that with the last order and you haven't paid it yet" and the manufacturer says "well we didn't get paid yet..."

so, as you can see, already there is debt ("financing") at every stage of the supply chain. Now consider that the manufacturer has introduced a product that's growing in popularity, and growth is the goal if you want to make more money and or spread your costs. In this instance the manufacturer is asking his suppliers for a double or triple order of supplies, because the retails and the distributor are clamoring to double or triple their orders over the previous orders... that they haven't paid for yet.

To smooth this process out, these different entities go to their banks and say "hey, I can sell triple my previous orders if I can just borrow some money short term, demand is so good that I can pay you interest". And the bank says "yes, borrow the money, it's the same interest rate, but borrowing triple at the same rate is triple the interest you have to pay, right?"

or the bank might say "that's waaaayyy too much money to borrow, look someplace else" and the manufacturer might instead be forced to sell stock on a stock exchange, giving partial ownership to investors in exchange for the cash they need for expansion.

This is why banks exist; this is why the stock market exists; and this is why it is not naive but incredibly sophisticated how finance works.

Most people on HN love to hate on MBAs, but this is just what they teach you in the first couple weeks of your first accounting class, a tiny piece of the curriculum.

For anybody who really wants to grok thinking this way, I'd highly recommend a book titled "The Goal" by Eliyahu Goldratt. It's written as a novel, it's a breezy and fun read with some deep ideas in it.

EDIT: addressing the complaint about something I susposedly left out: When you want to start a company, you need some seed money for a computer, a chair, a desk and a place to sit. If you are going to manufacture, you need equipment; if you are going to sell, you need space to store and display.

This entails money which you get from somebody else who will want interest, with higher interest for higher risk; or which you fund yourself from your savings but you were making money on your savings which you need to forego (cost of capital) so that's essentially the same thing. And when you are successful and expand, at some point you run out and need to go outside to finance anyway.

It has nothing to do with fixed percentages of profit on goods or services. Instead look only at the flow of money and what you are required to pay your financiers. You can tell your financiers "I'm willing to make less profit, so charge me less interest" but they will say back "you're making less profit? you just got riskier, we need to increase your interest rate"

if less profit is charged at any stage in the chain, that stage will have less money to reinvest in the next round of growth, and will need to borrow more. Sellers are not choosing their own profit margins, these numbers come from market bid-ask norms.

I understand that lowering the gross margin would increase both the cost of financing and the amount to be financed (both in absolute terms and as a proportion of revenue). That does further increase the price you need to charge in order to break even with offshore manufacturing, but again, the idea that you need to get back to the same gross margin irrespective of demand elasticity to break even with offshore manufacturing is silly.

I'd also strongly suggest Goldratt's lectures, titled "Beyond the Goal" over the Goal itself, as the novel is pretty thin on useful information comparatively.

1. nothing you said here refutes anything I did say.

2. you made no case for margins that would be independent of costs

3. I did make a case for why at least a portion of margins would would be relative to costs, which would make margins relative to costs.

4. also I did mention equity which means I did go beyond credit, and equity rates of return vs credit rates of return are the same math, it's just the discussion of financial risk that I left out because it is a complex subject

also I added an addendum based on your criticism.

You should say how you think this should work so people can learn from you.

In particular, the “theory of constraints” developed in “The Goal” and applied to tech in “The Phoenix Project” is a great lens through which to view processes. I tried to do it justice here, but after multiple attempts to write something I’ll just drop the Wikipedia article instead https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_constraints

For example, in some European countries where VAT + transaction fees get close to 25% a $10 decrease in manufacturing costs would allow a product to suffer a nearly $12.50 reduction in price whilst keeping the company’s absolute margin constant.

Naturally this channel doesn’t apply to most transport and logistics costs though.

When the input cost of something increases in the supply chain (prior to sale to consumer), the buyer doesn't pay VAT on the input. So if the input costs $10, and there is s 25% VAT, the buyer pays $12.50, but then gets a credit for the $2.50 VAT they paid.

When the buyer does their thing to add value, and sell to the next person in the chain, they charge VAT on the sale prices. Say the value add is $10, and they sell for $20 + $5 VAT.

When they go to pay VAT to the government their payment is only the difference between the input VAT payment, and the output VAT collected, in this case $5-$2.50=$2.50 goes to government.

If the input goes up to $16, they pay $4 input VAT. If they still add $10, their sale prices is $26, with $6.50 VAT. The amount that goes to the government is $6.50-$4 = $2.50

The VAT doesn't compound.

I emphasized the _"you"_ in the above quote to show that your explanation inadvertently combines separate business entities into one.

The following are separate independent businesses in the chain with their own profit markups:

- manufacturer e.g. Wolverine Worldwide makes and sells shoe for $25

- distributor (importer wholesale buyer) (e.g. Bonvita Aps[1]): add 100% markup or ~2x price which increases to $50

- retailer (e.g. H&M clothing retailer): buys for $50 from distributor and adds another 100% markup or ~2x price which increases it to $100

So the counterintuitive ~4x markup math happens because the separate businesses don't add a fixed flat margin but instead, a ~100% percentage margin. This multiplier effect (2x times 2x) across layers of middlemen causes the ~4x increased price difference the consumer sees. So it's not just labor cost but any component cost by the manufacturer can be multiplied by the chain. If a raw material like polyurethane goes up +50 cents, the final cost to the consumer can be increased ~4x to ~$2. This is what Wolverine Worldwide's Mike Jeppesen means in his quote "that cost quadruples after wholesale and retail markups,.

This is a great example where journalism on financial topics would actually easier and clearer with spreadsheets so readers can easily see the cause & effect of input costs to final costs. Using a narrative structure and isolated quotes from vice presidents just confuses readers because it seems like "4x" got invented out of thin air.

Btw, your explanation that assumes a flat fixed profit margin would be more realistic in a direct-to-consumer model. It looks like Wolverwine Worldwide does run some direct customer websites to sell Keds shoes but most retailer contract agreements require that the manufacturer never undersell the retailer. Therefore, you'd still have the ~4x increase in price but in the D2C channel, the manufacturer captures more of the profit instead of middlemen.

[1] https://www.wolverine.com/US/en/international-distributors/

Of course thats simplistic thinking, the tangent portfoglio is unknowable.

And there are other benefits of not charging the same profit margin.

But, in general, you’re going to have a bad time w/ investors if your profit margins are industry standard.

Do you have any relevant clothing industry/manufacturing experience to base your expectation on?

I fully expect they will last me the rest of my life. That’s very expensive, you may say - but consider how many pairs of $150 boots I would have gone through in that time.

I also have several pairs of high quality English dress shoes that are decades old. They look better than ever. They don’t crack and the stitching doesn’t fall apart. The biggest problem is finding a cobbler who can do a full high quality resole without damaging the uppers. They are all rapidly dying off.

Modern cloth and rubber shoes don’t last. The rubber deteriorates, the stitching and glues fail, and the cloth frays. They can’t be repaired. It’s not worth trying to make long-lasting, custom shoes from materials like that. Thus, the throwaway culture.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”

~ Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms

Romanian proverb, probably predating Pratchett :-p

You can still buy clothes that will last decades, they're just more expensive than the average person is willing to pay. Especially considering the length of time that something stays fashionable.

ETA: I just looked in my closet because I have a Sears dress shirt from the 70s. It is thin enough I can easily see my hand through it.

When the collars wore out, I'd remove them and sew them in upside down. You just can't kill BB shirts made up to around 1980.

Since then, I found out about Solovair, which manufactured shoes under the DM name in the UK for decades. I bought a pair about 8 months ago. What an incredible difference in quality. This pair still look great, and unlike Docs, I didn't immediately need to put insoles in them. I definitely will not buy Doc Martens again.

No college, but a great resume, and a natural seller.

The guys running the business didn't realize the fashion potential of their shoes.

They told her whatever you sell; we will give you a healthy percentage.

All the salesmen were guys in their 50's.

By year three, she was making $600,000/yr.

When they realized their utilitarian product was now a fashion statement, they let her go. She went on to make more money though doing her own line of shoes in America.

Stuff can still be made here, but the profits won't be as high.

Honestly, the higher quality pair is now significantly cheaper per use than the cheaper ones (if we disregard REIs return policy at least).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19ef5pqWLrE

Most old reliable brands are now churning out the same type of garbage. Doc Martens is a notable exception in that they do still make and prominently offer Made in England boots.

There are a lot more as well.

Spend $1000 on something Italian.

If you're not going to do that, then realize that buying a $100 pair of Florsheims every two years is actually a pretty good deal compared to what we used to do back in "the good 'ol days".

For the shoes they sliced the bottom off the foam-rubber soles, then glued solid rubber sheets back on.

One can whine about the costs relative to buying a new pair, but that's your decision.

These are all high quality, well made, durable products that cover all my needs and are a better value for me than cheap imported products.

This is an outdated stereotype. Asian manufacturers have well and truly moved up the value chain and currently produce many high quality products.

Yes you can still buy cheap low quality shoes produced in Asia, but you can also buy extremely high quality durable shoes if you so desire.

I totally agree. Most imports to the U.S., however, are of the low cost, low quality variety.

I live in my Blunnies, I wear them daily but the quality has varied on the 500's over time, generally for the worse. I bought a pair in Australia circa 2002. I had them resoled by NuShoe but eventually the leather and elastic panels wore out. The two pairs I currently have were made in Vietnam, both about ten years old. One pair had the sole crumble and disintegrate, the other is fine. On both the leather is holding up but the elastic panels are shot. My son had a pair of Super 550's made in China that lasted a year before the leather gave up on one toe and a leak formed at the welt. I intend to replace mine with Redwing Heritage Chelsea boots and see how they hold up.

For what it's worth, John Fluevog shoe quality also went down when the manufacturing went from Vietnam to China. My first pair I bought in Canada (no idea of the origin) and ruined the leather, my second were from Vietnam and still look great after many years of light use, the third pair and only ones I ordered online were made in China and the quality is gone- the "angelic sole" is softer, the leather cracked, the stitching is poor, the insole was badly fitted and wore and the inner heel on one wore out. They look cool but I won't buy more.

I will never buy another pair of flip-flops. So comfortable and the durability is so good I'm only on my second pair after 15 years of very consistent use. I literally run the treads out.

Breaking them in takes a solid month which is just getting your foot imprinted into the cork... but any initial discomfort is 100% worth it, and minimal in my experience.

There's also a very good warranty but I haven't personally used it.

So you’re part of that 1%, congratulations.

Round House overalls and jeans, Oklahoma. (Really great quality, lightweight denim, great for hot weather.)

Justin/Tony Lama boots, Fort Worth and El Paso, TX.

Socks from Cabellas/Bass Pro.

I go out of my way to buy American, but these goods don't cost much (if any) more than normal items.

Sure there are still people finding and loving US made shoes, there’s 1% of them according to the article, which in absolute number is a pretty big number of people (around 3 million people ?)

All these 3 million people coming out of the woodwork to tell their stories feel a bit like explaining how much their town has a nice neighborhood when commenting on nationwide mass incarceration. Sure, good for them, but I’m not sure what we should take away from that.

I'm trying to support US manufacturing where I can, but as far as I can tell, the choice to outsource was made to increase margins, not because of rising costs.

For instance some of Nike's flyknit series are way more comfortable, light and flexible that what local makers have to offer. It costs more churning through pairs, and going the built to order way adds to the cost, so it's not a cheap option. Margins might be huge for Nike, but I don't think they are much higher than for instance leather shoes retailed with 4 figure prices.

Local makers will go for "hand crafted", "built to last" shoes, there are as you say specialty shoes, and some luxury level local brands keeping classic designs. But I don't see it as forgoing margins, and more going for niches that don't need huge R&D development for manufacturing at scale.

This is the part that the child part of my brain always has trouble dealing with. This always seems ridiculous in my brain. I can intellectually understand why businesses want to scale their margins with costs, but it just seems so self-destructive (from a systemic standpoint) for something like shoes.

I don't know how this could really be different, but I hate it.

By specializing in just one thing (e.g. making shoes), and letting someone else package them, transport them, market them, help customers try them on a store, etc., you can get really damn good at just making shoes. The shoes you make will almost assuredly be cheaper and of higher quality than the guy that tries to do all the other stuff himself (in addition to making shoes).

In America, for physical goods, specialization almost always wins out despite the profit taking at each step, because labor is so much cheaper in other nations. Tesla and Trader Joe's wine are two great counter examples of vertical integration winning out big in industries that had become over-specialized over time.

What parasitic margins? Retail operations have 2% to 4% profit margins, and even Nike has around 10%, maybe 12% some years.

Operating income margins for 2019 (this is before taxes, and using pre-Covid).

Deckers 16%, Nike 12.2%, V.F. Corp 12%, Adidas 11.3%, Crocs 10.4%, Skechers 10%, Steve Madden 10%, Foot Locker 9.3%, Wolverine 7.5%, Shoe Carnival 4.8%, Under Armour 4.5%, Caleres 4%, Designer Brands Inc 3.7%

Look at what Under Armour charges and look at those horrific margins.

By comparison, big tech's operating income margins:

Facebook 42.5%, Microsoft 41.6%, Oracle 38.5%, Adobe 35.4%, Nvidia 33.3%, Qualcomm 31.7%, Intel 29.2%, Apple 28.7%, Google 28.4%, Cisco 27.5%, Netflix 21.8%, and so on.

the price of the shoes will always be set by the (retail) market, and that market seems to be saying (roughly) that the price of shoes (idealized for the sake of argument) is $50, whether made in china or the US. the chinese shoes, being $15 to make, allows more value to be captured and distributed along the value chain, providing crucial flexibility and resilience for operations, distribution, and marketing. the american shoes costing $30 to make means it has less value to capture and less supply chain flexibility. the chinese shoe distributor has more margin to work with to outcompete the domestic shoe through the 4 P's of marketing (price, product, place, promotion).

(this is the kind of stuff you learn in an mba program, specifically, marketing & strategy classes)

Why isn't the 5 dollar African made shoe adding enough value to be a player in a more expensive market?

Are we sure the market has settled for $50 or is made in America worth and extra $10/15 dollars?

The supply chain with additional transportation and others costs would push the price to $20 per hour in China compared to $30 an hour. A tariff of $10 on imports would equalize the price. Would that push the market price to $60 for the shoes from China and would that push the American price to $75? Or would the Chinese shoes sell still sell for $50 forcing profit down or would they need to drop to $40 to set the market lower?

that's too underspecified to provide a good answer in this context. perhaps it's poor market fit, lack of cheap logistics, or merely racism. or something else entirely, it's hard to say.

> "Are we sure the market has settled for $50 or is made in America worth and extra $10/15 dollars?"

the $50 was assumed/asserted to make the discussion simpler. of course in a real market you'll have a variety of price-quality tradeoffs to choose from, which is the market trying to capture all the surplus value it can. for sure, some folks will pay extra for an american label.

> "The supply chain with additional transportation and others costs would push the price to $20 per hour in China compared to $30 an hour. A tariff of $10 on imports would equalize the price. Would that push the market price to $60 for the shoes from China and would that push the American price to $75? Or would the Chinese shoes sell still sell for $50 forcing profit down or would they need to drop to $40 to set the market lower?"

in the short term, the market price wouldn't be swayed by mere changes in costs (including tariffs). raising prices changes consumer behavior (i.e., price elasticity), which dampens the ability of the firm to make such unilateral changes. perhaps through advertising/lobbying/public relations, shoe companies can change the perception on what a fair market price is for their shoes (and thereby raise prices without negative affects on sales), but that's a different effect beyond simply costs changing. longer term, market participants may drop out due to unprofitability, which would change supply, and as a result change the market price through the lack of lower-priced alternatives.

you sell shoes at the highest price the market will bear (actually a range, given price discrimination techniques), and then adjust the 4 P's in response. the market price is dynamic and part of the function of marketing is keeping tabs on it.

The cost of the shoe ends up only being a third of overall costs. I'm also not going to sell everything, but I still need to keep buying inventory to keep the machine going.

If I don't sell the product at least 3x what I paid for it, there's no way I can maintain sufficient capital to keep a business running and hedge against risks.

My wife is a fashion designer, and development is a huge component. She begins developing garments like 1.5 years ahead of delivery.

The steps are generally: Choose and order fabric, design a garment, have a patternmaker make a pattern, have cutter cut the fabric for a sample, have a sewer create a sample, fit it on a fit model, adjust pattern, cut, sew, fit, adjust, cut, sew, fit, wash and dye the fabric to understand shrinkage, have a grader create the size grading, send pattern and sew-by sample to factory, have them make a sample, fit, adjust pattern, and have them make another sample, fit (this can repeat a few more times until the factory gets it right).

Chinese factories “bury” the cost of development when providing prices. Suffice to say that creating samples and shipping sample garments back to the US in order to check that the factory is making it to spec (multiple times) can extend development times many more months and greatly increase costs (keep in mind you are paying US designer salaries during this extended dev). Money can eventually be saved depending on the scale of your business. At least with garments, Chinese production is not a guaranteed money saver, though from my observation the overall logistics of garment making are not well-understood by business owners so they just shove it all overseas without fully understanding what they’re getting into.

I bucketed it into "year-long lead process" and sample management.

> Chinese factories “bury” the cost of development when providing prices

My last company manufactured original designs in Italy, and quality aside still had all the same logistical and operational overhead as working in China. Factories still hide a lot of the technical details of product design, such as grading or digitization. And even if you have that sophistication, each factory uses different equipment and processes so vendor-delivered digital artifacts can rarely be used as-is (and many vendors are working with multiple factories).

> Chinese production is not a guaranteed money saver

Sourcing material is hard work. Finding suppliers, implementing internal IT software and processes, coordinating with factories, storage, and changes to COGs accounting. There's a lot of risk to own this process and managing it's impact on the supply chain. Everything is fun and games until you run out of buttons.

The “button problems” usually arise a couple years later when they say “hey let’s use our leftover buttons from the previous season. We should have x of them left.” Then someone forgets to count them and some months later it’s discovered that there aren’t enough, nor enough time to place another order.

Are the products you have experience with garments/shoes or something else?

Absolutely. This seems to be a trend, and a lot of fashion designers I know have learned how to work with a factory or factory agents to get technical product design details communicated. Full-stack fashion.

It's also great to have a technical designer in the process so you don't end up with surprises like 20% margins because of exotic materials or three-month delays because of accessory availability issues. You end up with one person that knows how to create and design appealing products, and another that anchors them in the reality of the business and "steers" them towards options with better margin outcomes (who in turn is probably working with people in procurement and delivering technical specs to factories).

> But the benefit of her method is that she can more easily switch to different contractors and factories

Every businesses dream. I live in Los Angeles where this happens a lot in "smaller" batches downtown, which is always cool to see. It's a shame we've lost this ability on a state or national level.

> Are the products you have experience with garments/shoes or something else?

Almost exclusively shoes, and a little bit of everything else (handbags, some apparel and jewellery). It was a very humbling experience, learning how little I knew about design and manufacturing and that software was just an enabling force (not necessarily a driving force). Supply chain problems are hard.

She’s very resourceful: of her strategies for finding new contractors is to listen for the sounds of sewing machines in buildings and then knock on the door. It’s like a weird hidden economy. And they basically didn’t shut down at all during the pandemic.

She made shoes for fun recently with a guy in North Hollywood. One person operation, decades of experience, and his skills are absolutely incredible. He should be a star, but instead he’s just laboring alone in a little box way out in the valley.

> duties, warehousing, distribution, employee salary, marketing costs, rent, insurance, expensive photo shoots

Only the Duties automatically scale with inventory cost.

like the top-of-thread poster, I get that there are overheads. I don't understand why overheads seem to scale with the cost of purchasing the inventory.

But it shouldn't be roughly the entire cost that scales that way.

So it's less that costs scale, and more that you manage your business to keep margins at a certain band.

And is less an "average" number and more of a benchmark to aim for. It's perfectly possible to run a business on a 55% margin, but investors have options and whether it's VC or traditional bank loans this number is going to come up and be a distinguishing factor on cash availability.

If I'm doing $Y this year, and next year I want to do 2x$Y, costs will actually increase superlinear to revenues. The goal of every company is to reach a point where revenues outpace costs, but business doesn't work that way and things are rarely predictable and many successes are rarely repeatable.

If you're a retail business, it costs money to maintain a lease and storefront not to mention hire and manage employees. You also have overhead to deliver product to each individual store, and shipping isn't free. Nor is the coordination of deciding what product to ship to what store, because maybe they have different weather and one place sells more of a certain category.

Maybe you're selling online, so you have to invest in performance marketing. Or you're sending catalogues through a 3rd party vendor. Reaching new customers is expensive.

Maybe you decide to invest in in-house manufacturing, which requires many millions in upfront capital expenses, equipment acquisition, and expensive ERP integrations with machining and scheduling software.

Actually running a business is hard, and there are many variables that come up. The best you can do is try and maintain a consistent margin, and manipulate the many different levers available to do so. Maybe that's opening new stores, or closing poor performers. Maybe it's laying off staff. Maybe it's expanding into new categories, or cutting your loss on categories that didn't work out. Maybe your staple product that was driving the core of your business for years is quickly loosing steam, and you have to find alternatives.

If only the product cost was my biggest concern.

However business is not a zero sum game and everyone wins when there are wins. Especially when those wins create new secondary industries Adding to the overall infrastructure that make possible and lower the barrier to entry for everyone else.

$50 has nothing to do with the cost, it's an entirely made up amount that is the estimated maximum increase the market will bear. It's the price of the conscience of the consumer who feels they should buy American.

Remember, nobody is trying to make a "fair" profit, they're trying to make as much as possible.

Wolverine Shoe company dumped toxic waste from leather tanning operations into the ground water everywhere around their headquarters in Rockford, MI. Not surprisingly, there have been extremely high rates of cancer and various illnesses in the community.

It’s hard for me to read a quote about them making shoes anywhere else knowing what they’ve done in the US.

The hilarious thing is that in the Victorian age English factories made clothes for the Empire. That's how European countries made their money: force their colonies to buy European products. Trade at gunpoint.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inland_Customs_Line

> Footwear manufacturing has long included machines — cutting or gluing soles. But higher-level innovation? Ironically, factory owners said that's happening where the industry is — overseas.

Even the automation is happening in Asia.

If we don't use this as our opportunity to re-onshore, we're going to fall far behind. Perhaps permanently so.

We should be providing every tax incentive under the sun to domestic companies working on automating manufacturing.

Thankfully Vans hasn't done this yet.

> "A lot of the people have said multiple times that they definitely don't want their son or daughter doing this [making shoes]," Heselton [of Maine Mountain Moccasin] said. "That's tough to hear."

The sense of loss implied in the title makes sense. But ultimately, were these good jobs to begin with?

The article doesn't even mention the environmental problems associated with curing leather, or making other components. All of those costs have been shipped overseas, along with the jobs.

The problem, of course, is that this practice of having China, Inc. make everything used in this US is increasing reliance on an increasingly problematic country.

The article mentions factories moving to other Asian countries as it's cheaper there.

>...higher-level innovation? Ironically, factory owners said that's happening where the industry is — overseas.

I don't think there's anything ironic about this. Innovation happens close to the product, where you can get a true understanding of what you're doing and what the process is. We see this in projects gone awry all the time - until you're sitting at your desk working on the project, you don't know what the problem space actually is.

In addition to all the obvious problems with the dismantling of America's manufacturing capacity, I think this is one of the real, critical, and silent issues - for a country that keeps touting innovation, not a lot of that happens here... apart from industries where there still is a strong manufacturing core in the country. The mercantilist rhetoric about buy American is stupid, but so is the blind faith that global capitalism won't destroy the ground it's built on.

More obviously, Vietnamese factories cannot afford to hire Michael Jordan et. al. and the world's top Ad Agencies who actually drive sales.

Of all of the sectors that we should be concerned about, this one is not it.

1) Shoes are odd and there's no way we're going to make robots anytime soon to do all these nimble things that require hands.

2) Overseas makers don't have any technical leverage - and definitely not brand power - so it's unlikely they'll usurp the system.

3) It's not a strategic sector.

I don't think there's much we can do here.

I'd be more interested in high end robots to make cars and electronics cheaper.

Electronics is one area that we could endeavour to 'bring jobs back'. Shoes, not so much.

For example weightlifting shoes are absolutely dominated by made in China shoes, and these are not at a low price point. The only made in US weightlifting shoes I know of (Position) are apparently quite poor quality and absolutely blown out of the water by the others (on the other hand, outside of shoes, there is a lot of made in the US weightlifting equipment which is very high quality and apparently enjoys healthy sales as a result).

Maybe I'm missing certain niches? But my uninformed impression is that this is also true for shoes in other sports such as running, and other industries such as construction.

[disc: I'm one of the directors here and happy to answer any questions].

https://www.npr.org/2019/03/24/706295355/the-last-american-b...

https://www.npr.org/2019/03/18/704503206/a-small-town-in-tex...

(It's Nocona, in Nocona, TX.)

For what it's worth, these are the shoes I like to wear[0], but they ain't cheap.

They are very comfortable.

[0] https://sasnola.com/collections/all-mens/products/jv-mesh-bl...

I get sick of shoes that look comfortable, but aren't (I'm looking at you, Sketchers).

I'm on my feet, all day (standing desk). Comfortable shoes are a must.

Since the young whippersnappers in the tech industry have already written people like me off, just for being over 40, there's not much to be gained by worrying about whether or not they think I'm stylish. I might as well be comfortable.

Being "old" isn't an excuse for looking shabby. Downvote me to hell.

It’s a perfectly good point. You're stating that older folks have good taste and ability. Frankly, it’s refreshing to see it being admitted on a technical forum. I’m actually used to the opposite. Also, refreshingly, it came from personal life experience, as opposed to a hypothetical strawman argument.

I don’t look “shabby,” and I’m also not actually “old,” as far as I’m concerned. It’s others that have decided they have the authority to apply these labels to me. I’ve just learned that if people will stick a label onto me, I should take ownership of it, and restyle it to my taste.

I guess no one noticed that SAS makes their shoes in the US, which was actually the OP I made. Style had nothing to do with it. It was you guys that went there with the Mr. Blackwell critique (after all, everyone knows that when you want to understand the latest trends in fashion, geeks are where it's at), which may actually speak to the article’s point.

Sorry to hear about your grandfather’s health challenges, but I can certainly relate to his “outpacing some half his age.” I regularly do so, in the technical arena.

Doesn't this sound like "our business model is working just fine, please don't disrupt it"?

You could try to attack a different market segment, like more expensive shoes, but that isn't disruption.

You could try a marketing gimmick, like "buy these more expensive shoes and we will send you replacements for life." But it wouldn't be sustainable, and the competition could just offer the same thing and there goes your disruption. You could probably get a couple of years of press, just long enough to sell the company and make the founders a mint (if anyone's dumb enough to buy it).

>"it's very hard to envision a scenario where we'd make the types of products that we make, at the effectively slave labor prices we pay people to make them, in a place that would require us to pay them more."

However, making shoes more cheaply almost assuredly means finding a way to get rid of the human labour.

Isn’t the problem the high manufacturing cost? How would you “disrupt” that?

Just fyi. This project may have even gotten canceled. But it shows the future and china is very afraid of it. I also know German companies trying to bring asian footwear production back right now.

https://youtube.com/c/Tringshoerepairkeyshop

... along with many of the most high-quality, low-tolerance manufactured parts and products ever made.

Overall, they have lost massively, at least in the USA. The purchasing power of the dollar has declined by over a factor of seven in the last 50 years since 1970 [1]. Real wages have remained stagnant, and the wage scale has declined such that the actual minimum wage today is $7.25, up from $1.60 in 1970, but the inflation-adjusted minimum wage would be $11.05 [2].

So, if ALL prices had declined by half as have electronics, they'd be only a bit marginally better off. But most prices have not declined as much, and have risen much more, housing, healthcare, food, etc.

The net result is that we exported the former middle-class lifestyle to China, in exchange for importing and having to compete with their low wage lifestyle. Not a smart bargain.

[1] https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1970?amount=1 [2] https://www.dollartimes.com/inflation/items/1970-united-stat...

> Economists find that—after taking both the winners and losers into account—trade has net benefits for society. In other words, the benefits outweigh the costs. This does not seem obvious to many people because the costs are often more visible than the benefits. For example, it is relatively easy to identify businesses or industries that have shut down because of trade. Likewise, it is relatively easy to identify people who have lost jobs in those industries. Perhaps you know someone who has lost a job in this way. However, it is more difficult for consumers to identify how much cheaper their car, clothing, and food are because of international trade. In addition, the lower prices paid by consumers and businesses mean they have more money to spend on other goods and services. As a result, there are businesses that have experienced more growth as a result of that spending, which would not have happened without trade. But, again, those gains can be difficult to identify.

https://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/page1-econ/2017...

* Loss of IP: CCP demands key IP is turned over for access to markets, obviously advantaging their companies over ours

* Loss of know-how, capability to manufacture: key knowledge of how to actually make things is lost, which creates a new, unmeasured, and often fatal drag on onshore companies, and streamlines innovation offshore

* Loss of innovation: IP and know-how lead to innovation; before offshoring, China's patent output wasn't even a rounding error. Now they are on the leaderboard in patent output

* Loss of strategic position - industrially: China is actively working to corner key markets from rare earth minerals to solar panel production

* Loss of strategic position - geopolitical/military: This offshoring funds CCP making key military advances, and also

* Loss of control of supply chains: as is now being seen in spades, even without specific adversarial action, supply chains are now so complex that massive segments of the economy literally cannot get the parts they need to produce. Just in the last 24 hours I've read about this for automobiles, clothing, shoes, tents, and bicycles.

* Insecurity of supply chains: Long supply chains in the hands of an adversary are obviously subject to being shut off for geopolitical reasons, as has been done by the CCP. Australia just recognized the threat and caused a major international rupture trying to compensate.

* Literal military security threats: There are numerous incidents of backdoors and flaws being inserted into technology sourced overseas, as well as spying on the manufacture. And of course there is the certainty that if it comes near to a hot war, key components WILL be shut off.

While the West thinks that they are exploiting China's cheap labor, it is really CCP that is exploiting the West's focus on quarterly profits. Their plan is global hegemony, and our myopic focus on studies like you mention is exactly why this is likely to go down as a blunder of historic scale.

In general, and in principle, I'm in favor of free trade - it is the ideal situation.

Among societies with relatively equal capabilities and regulatory environments, and compatible governments (democracy vs authoritarian), free trade should be the default setting.

But, free trade, aside from the massive strategic risks, is also a very convenient way for businesses to externalize their costs. Required to actually provide benefits like minimum wage to your workers? Required to not pollute the town you live it? Need to 'recycle' plastics that can't actually be economically recycled? Why bother, those cost too much! Just export the problems to some other poor nation where you can use slave labor, pollute all you want and just dump the 'recycling' as trash, and complain about Free Trade Restrictions... Nevermind that we create new countries with competitive CO2 emissions, vast polluted wastelands, slave labor, and that our labor force is now directly competing with theirs.

Of course it looks like there's a benefit to us. And of course the economists you sponsor can produce studies showing how beneficial it is. That does not mean that it is true, especially in the long term.

Yes Free Trade in general is a great ideal. That does not mean that it is an unalloyed good in every situation.

I'm talking about a general myopia focusing on short-term

I was in favor of the TPP, at least the parts that both dealt with some of the inequalities and esp. in that it constrained China.

CCP is a huge problem, and is both uniquely well-positioned and explicitly strategizing to exploit this myopia. It may be the only example like this, but such a failure can be existential. That's why it becomes a focus.

Many other situations are different, but giving away core manufacturing know-how is not typically covered by economists as a long-term issue, and is very hard to restore once lost.

But they are made in Sweden?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Volvo_Car_production_p...

It would be interesting to quantify the impact of labor cost vs. the impact of close-by suppliers and infrastructure. Once the aglet factory is right next door and run by your brother-in-law, there's not much reason to leave a place.