Made in America label stages comeback at U.S. stores

May 3, 2013 by Leave a comment

NEW YORK: When Roger Simmermaker went shopping for clothes at a Florida mall in the mid-1990s, he wanted to buy American, but to his frustration, he couldn’t find anything made in the USA.

The experience motivated Simmermaker, an electronics technician by trade, to write “How Americans Can Buy American” – a guide to finding products manufactured in the United States, which were a scarce commodity at the time.

Nearly 20 years after writing the book, he has seen a big change, with the pendulum in full swing back toward a wider choice of American-made products. They are often available without the expected higher price tag.

“It’s definitely easier,” says Simmermaker, 47, who lives in Orlando and works for a defense contractor. “Especially in the last year or so, things have really changed.”

Those who believe in buying American-made goods from US-owned companies say it creates jobs and boosts the economy through reinvested profits and taxes.

Profit-driven US companies have their own reasons for locating factories, but manufacturers of goods ranging from refrigerators and dishwashers to laptops and tablets are starting to bring some of their production home, affording more opportunities for consumers with the patriotic conviction that Americans ought to buy American.

Better still, that “Made in the USA” label may no longer carry such a premium price tag. That’s because production and shipping costs in China and other foreign manufacturing centers are rising. Shifting some manufacturing back to the United States doesn’t necessarily mean manufacturers have to raise prices to compensate for higher labor costs.

To be sure, many industries are still dominated by imports – toys and textiles, for example. Still, Simmermaker and others who believe in buying American are seeing a broad shift.

“Reshoring” advocates were thrilled earlier this year when Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world’s largest retailer, announced it was throwing its weight behind the movement. In January, the chain – known for its extensive selection of imported goods – said it would spend an additional $50 billion over the next 10 years on American-made products, “helping to onshore US production in high-potential areas like textiles, furniture and higher-end appliances.”

Likewise, Apple Inc. said it planned to build some of its iMac line in the United States instead of China. Ford Motor Co., Coleman Co. (part of Jarden Corp. ) and Master Lock Co. (part of Fortune Brands Home & Security Co.) all have said they’re returning some manufacturing to the United States. The list goes on.

WHAT IT MEANS FOR CONSUMERS 

While few companies will move production for patriotic reasons alone, the public relations boost that goes with a decision to bring jobs back to the United States is gravy.

“They run the numbers and say ‘We can deliver just as cheaply from a US operation as we can from, say, China.’ It has some nice extra benefits,” says Dan Seiver, chief economist for Reilly Financial Advisors, a wealth management firm in San Diego, California. “Whatever credit goes with it is fine”

With little pricing difference, the impact on US consumers might not be that obvious. But Simmermaker and other advocates also contend that products made in the United States are often higher-quality and safer than those made elsewhere.

There is a decided upside for the companies, too. Making products closer to their end-market allows them to be more nimble in terms of customizing and delivering products.

That was the case with Spreadshirt, a Germany-based custom shirt maker that recently opened a plant in Nevada to supplement the output of its existing facility in Pennsylvania.

In 2011, the company was running its Pennsylvania plant around the clock. To keep up with holiday demand, it was forced to send some work to a plant in Poland, said Mark Venezia, vice president of global sales and marketing for North America.

But the company quickly realized that the distance hurt overall costs and speed – to the tune of about $2 more per unit. “We didn’t lose money, but, obviously, it hurt our bottom line,” Venezia said.

Hunting for a new location led Spreadshirt to Henderson, Nevada, where facilities that met specifications were available at favorable terms, along with a pool of prospective workers.

“We just got this incredible deal that provided us so many benefits,” Venezia said.

 

Filed under Economy, Insourcing, Labor, Made in America, Made in USA Tagged with , , , , , , ,

How ‘Made in the USA’ is Making a Comeback

April 11, 2013 by Leave a comment

Rana Foroohar Curious Capitalist

By 

The U.S. economy continues to struggle, and the weak March jobs report — just 88,000 positions were added — briefly spooked the market. But step back and you’ll see a bright spot, perhaps the best economic news the U.S. has witnessed since the rise of Silicon Valley: Made in the USA is making a comeback. Climbing out of the recession, the U.S. has seen its manufacturing growth outpace that of other advanced nations, with some 500,000 jobs created in the past three years. It marks the first time in more than a decade that the number of factory jobs has gone up instead of down. From ExOne’s 3-D manufacturing plant near Pittsburgh to Dow Chemical’s expanding ethylene and propylene production in Louisiana and Texas, which could create 35,000 jobs, American workers are busy making things that customers around the world want to buy — and defying the narrative of the nation’s supposedly inevitable manufacturing decline.Time Magazine Made in the USA

The past several months alone have seen some surprising reversals. Apple, famous for the city-size factories in China that produce its gadgets, decided to assemble one of its Mac computer lines in the U.S. Walmart, which pioneered global sourcing to find the lowest-priced goods for customers, said it would pump up spending with American suppliers by $50 billion over the next decade — and save money by doing so (for TIME’s new cover story, written by myself and Bill Saporito, and available to subscribers, click here). And Airbus will build JetBlue’s new jets in Alabama.

Some economists argue that the gains are a natural part of the business cycle, rather than a sustainable recovery in the sector. But I would argue that the improvements of the last three years aren’t a blip. They are the sum of a powerful equation refiguring the global economy. U.S. factories increasingly have access to cheap energy thanks to oil and gas from the shale boom. For companies outside the U.S., it’s the opposite: high global oil prices translate into costlier fuel for ships and planes — which means some labor savings from low-cost plants in China evaporate when the goods are shipped thousands of miles. And about those low-cost plants: workers from China to India are demanding and getting bigger paychecks, while U.S. companies have won massive concessions from unions over the past decade. Suddenly the math on outsourcing doesn’t look quite as attractive. Paul Ashworth, the North America economist for research firm Capital Economics, is willing to go a step further. “The offshoring boom,” Ashworth wrote in a recent report, “does appear to have largely run its course.”

Today’s U.S. factories aren’t the noisy places where your grandfather knocked in four bolts a minute for eight hours a day. Dungarees and lunch pails are out; computer skills and specialized training are in, since the new made-in-America economics is centered largely on cutting-edge technologies. The trick for U.S. companies is to develop new manufacturing techniques ahead of global competitors and then use them to produce goods more efficiently on superautomated factory floors. These factories of the future have more machines and fewer workers — and those workers must be able to master the machines. Many new manufacturing jobs require at least a two-year tech degree to complement artisan skills such as welding or milling. The bar will only get higher: Some experts believe it won’t be too long before employers will expect a four-year degree — a job qualification that will eventually be required in many other places around the world too.

(MORE: Is U.S. Manufacturing Really Back?)

Understanding this new look is critical if the U.S. wants to nurture manufacturing and grow jobs. There are implications for educators (who must ensure that future workers have the right skills) as well as policy-makers (who may have to set new educational standards). “Manufacturing is coming back, but it’s evolving into a very different type of animal than the one most people recognize today,” says James Manyika, a director at McKinsey Global Institute who specializes in global high tech. “We’re going to see new jobs, but nowhere near the number some people expect, especially in the short term.”

Still, if the U.S. can get this right, though, the payoff will be tremendous. Manufacturing represents a whopping 67% of private-sector R&D spending as well as 30% of the country’s productivity growth. Every $1 of manufacturing activity returns $1.48 to the economy. “The ability to make things is fundamental to the ability to innovate things over the long term,” says Willy Shih, a Harvard Business School professor and co-author of Producing Prosperity: Why America Needs a Manufacturing Renaissance. “When you give up making products, you lose a lot of the added value.” In other words, what you make makes you. For more on the rebound in manufacturing and what it means for jobs and economic growth in the US, check out this week’s TIME magazine cover story, “Made In America.”
Read more: http://business.time.com/2013/04/11/how-made-in-the-usa-is-making-a-comeback/#ixzz2QCREv0EC

Source: http://business.time.com/2013/04/11/how-made-in-the-usa-is-making-a-comeback/

Filed under China, Labor, Made in America, Made in USA Tagged with , , , , ,

Town hall meeting to address “Keep it Made in America”

April 9, 2013 by Leave a comment

By 

Rebuilding the manufacturing base and creating jobs in western New York is the focus of a town hall meeting being held in downtown Buffalo Monday night.

It’s called the ‘Keep it Made in America’ Town Hall. And it’s being hosted by the Alliance for American Manufacturing and the United Steelworkers.

The union’s District 4 Director John Shinn says the goal is to help business leaders, organized labor, elected officials, educators and citizens understand the role manufacturing can play in reinvigorating the economy.

“Citizens of the state, when they have these manufacturing jobs, they spend money. It helps the secondary businesses. One dollar paid to a worker in New York state in the manufacturing sector would role over to the area businesses three, four times.”

Shinn says governments can help by enacting policies that guarantee taxpayer funded projects use goods made in the USA. And he says the academic community can help by educating students with the necessary skills to fill jobs.
“There’s a demand for skilled labor positions within manufacturing and also semi-skilled labor positions…We have employers that can’t hire instrument technicians, electricians, welders, pipe fitters…these are good living-wage jobs.”

The meeting includes panel discussions, video presentations and opportunities for audience participation.  It gets underway Monday in Asbury Hall on Delaware Avenue at 6 p.m.

 

 

Source:http://news.wbfo.org/post/town-hall-meeting-address-keep-it-made-america

Filed under Government, Industry, Made in America, Made in USA, Manufacturing Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Made-in-USA label pays off for investors

April 1, 2013 by Leave a comment

usatoday logo

Adam Shell, USA TODAY

NEW YORK — The benefits of the Made-in-the-USA marketing tag now apply to stocks as well as shoes, SUVs and software.

How so? With Europe hobbled by debt, white-hot China cooling and emerging markets slowing, stocks of U.S. companies that get most of their revenue from U.S.-based sales are performing better than companies that do 50% or more of their sales abroad, where things aren’t going as well.

The part of the world where a company makes most of its money can be the difference between a great investment and an OK one. In the past 12 months, U.S. stocks that generate all sales at home are up an average of 18.6%, vs. a gain of 6.2% for American firms that get more than half their revenue from abroad, Bespoke Investment Group says.

“A major theme of 2013 has clearly been a preference for U.S.-centric stocks,” says Paul Hickey, Bespoke’s co-founder. Why? “The U.S., relative to the rest of the world, is the strongest economy.”

That trend helped drive the Standard & Poor’s 500 index to an all-time closing high Thursday and a 10% first-quarter gain.

Domestically focused companies are also sporting better earnings growth, as well as benefiting from inflows of capital from foreign investors that view the U.S. as a haven, Hickey says.

One of Wall Street’s biggest winners this year is media subscription service Netflix, which gets less than 3% of its sales outside the U.S., says S&P Dow Jones Indices. Netflix shares are up 104%. In contrast, tech player Qualcomm, which gets nearly 97% of revenue from abroad and recently warned of slowing growth in Asia, is up 8.2%.

 Nearly half, or 46%, of sales of companies in the S&P 500 occur overseas, says Howard Silverblatt, an analyst at S&P Dow Jones Indices.

Analysts also see positives in the All-American story, as they’ve been issuing more positive earnings revisions than negative ones in the past four weeks.

The U.S. market, and particularly, domestically focused names, have held up better than foreign stock markets recently following the “Cyprus Surprise,” the latest bailout in the eurozone to spook global investors. Also driving the better performance is the spate of better-than-expected economic data this month, which prompted Barclays to raise its first-quarter U.S. GDP estimate to 2.6% from 1.6%.

While U.S. shares have performed better than a broad index of foreign stocks for more than two years, the outperformance has been particularly acute since late 2012, when the U.S. averted a fiscal crisis and election-related political gridlock weighed on sentiment.

“Once the ‘fiscal cliff’ negotiations were settled, U.S. stocks rebounded and haven’t looked back,” Hickey says.

 

source: http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/markets/2013/03/31/american-centric-stocks-sport-big-gains/2022159/

Filed under Aerospace, Automotive, Business, COOL Country of origin labeling, Currency Manipulation, Made in USA Tagged with , , , , ,

Do you want to know what country your food comes from?

March 28, 2013 by 1 Comment

We think you do and an overwhelming 92% of American’s say -YES in a recent Boston Consulting Group survey of consumers.

Sadly, the WTO (World Trade Organization) doesn’t see it that way.  The WTO has ruled that U.S. producers of beef, poultry, lamb and other agriculture products must remove the current legislated Country of Origin Labeling from their packages by May 23rd. (less then 2 short months away)
So, now consumers will lose the transparency in their food supply that for years they have fought for.  Scary, but true.
What is even scarier is that mainstream media hasn’t picked up on this story in a major way so, many consumers don’t even know what is about to happen in May to the packaging of the goods they buy everyday for themselves and their families.
So, what can you do about it.

1st Let your Grocer, Retailer and Producer know this is important and you want to know where your food comes from
2nd tell them we have an independent solution for you to know and you want to see the label “Product of USA Certified”.

Our company is the  leader in independent, 3rd party certification of the Product of USA Certified claim.  We are a voluntary certification that producers can use on their product and packaging to let consumers know –that they are proudly – PRODUCT OF USA CERTIFIED.

U.S. consumers have the right to now where their food comes from and producers have the right to voluntary market their products with our trademarked certification.

We are the solution that consumers and producers are looking for.

Contact us today for more information.

Product of USA Certified

Please get the word out and follow us on
Facebook Twitter Website

“Trust but Certify”

Filed under COOL Country of origin labeling, CPG, Farming, Food, Government, Made in America, Made in USA Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Hotels bet guests will favor furnishings made in USA

March 15, 2013 by Leave a comment

usatoday logo

Montague Furniture

By:Barbara Delollis USA Today

When you walk into a hotel in the U.S. today, you’ll see many items – chairs, draperies, lamps – that were made in China, Vietnam, Malaysia or elsewhere overseas.

But that’s gradually changing, hotel designers and furniture makers tell Hotel Check-In.

There’s a small but growing trend among hotels to buy more items from local, regional or U.S. vendors.

Hotel owners, developers and designers are increasingly deciding it’s worth it, even if they pay a little extra for a U.S. product.

Why? There’s time and risk involved with ordering items from overseas, plus showcasing locally made goods can give the hotel a patriotic or community-minded spin.

Examples:

  • The Hyatt Regency Minneapolis recently finished a $25 million revamp that used “Made in America” as its central theme. More than three-quarters of the items purchased for the renovation came from the USA, says designer Michael Suomi of New York-based Stonehill & Taylor. The guest bathroom counter tops, for instance, feature granite quarried locally and purchased from a century-old Minnesota company.
  • The Ritz-Carlton Lodge, Reynolds Plantation, in Greensboro, Ga., is in the midst of redecorating to give guests a lighter, more modern look with many U.S.-made products, says Megan Ybarra of the Dallas-based interior design firm Duncan Miller Ullman. The hotel found wall coverings from Kentucky, guestroom carpet from Georgia, and a Texas metalwork firm was hired to custom-make the metal branches that form the base of guestroom ottomans, she says.
  • The InterContinental Chicago’s 477-room renovation emphasizes locally-sourced materials and furniture, says Dan Egan, the hotel’s sales and marketing director. Guest rooms contain drapery from Union, Ill., headboards from Jasper, Ind., wall covering from York, Penn., and room signage in hallways from McCook, Ill.
  • Montague, a 20-year-old guestroom furniture maker, last April invested in its first-ever factory – and it’s located in North Carolina, says Misty Delbridge, who runs the company’s U.S. division. It made sense, because hotel owners are increasingly seeking products made here and the factory was in danger of closing down, she says. A Hilton hotel in Texas, for instance, is having the company prepare two model rooms for a renovation – one outfitted with furnishings made in Vietnam and the other with furnishings made in the U.S., she says. Montague still has about 70% of its products produced in China and Malaysia.

No. 1 priority: Put heads in beds

Another factor driving the growth in U.S.-sourced products is hotels’ rush to renovate in as small a window as possible so that rooms can stay filled with paying customers, says Delbridge. It’s especially true in New York City, where some hotels can be sold out or almost sold out most nights of the year.

“If the cost (to purchase U.S.-made furniture) is 10% higher and the hotel can gain revenue back in six to eight weeks, they’re all about it because then they could have a ‘Made in America’ story and gain revenue,” Delbridge says. “These companies wouldn’t do it just for the story. There’s got to be an advantage in it for them.”

Hotel renovations are faster paced than building new hotels from scratch, notes Ybarra, who worked on the Ritz-Carlton Lodge project. It typically takes about 18 months to renovate a hotel, which since the recession has been the most common activity among hoteliers, vs. about three years to build a new one, she says.

“Our clients are willing to pay an extra dollar or two to not have the hassle of waiting,” Ybarra says. There’s also the risk of complications, she says, citing long waits at U.S. Customs and a time when pirates took over containers filled with items for a Turks and Caicos hotel.

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Filed under Business, Economy, Green, Made in America, Made in USA, Manufacturing, Power of Consumers Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Label It Bull: Livestock Regulations Spark Backlash From Meat Producers

March 13, 2013 by 1 Comment

cattle U.S.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is facing a backlash from small livestock producers and others over its move to tighten meat-labeling regulations, which would force them to separate animals based on where they were born, raised and slaughtered.

The step is being billed as a way to bring the U.S. into compliance with World Trade Organization agreements, but there are a growing number in the industry who argue it will alienate the country’s trading partners and force small American meat farms out of business.

“Only the government could take a costly, cumbersome rule like mandatory country-of-origin labeling (COOL) and make it worse even as it claims to ‘fix it,” said American Meat Institute President J. Patrick Boyle.

Boyle believes the proposed rule will make the current requirements even more expensive, onerous and disruptive.

The Department of Agriculture recently proposed the new rule for labeling muscle cuts of meat. That means beef, veal, lamb, pork, goat and chicken — which are now labeled as simply a product of one country or more — will have to include additional details including where each animal was born, raised and slaughtered.

The new labeling regulations would force thousands of meat processors and retailers to change the way they label products. The USDA estimates the initial cost would range between $17 million and $48 million.

The USDA’s Agriculture Marketing Service began working on a rule change after the U.S. partially lost a WTO appeal in 2012. “The USDA expects that these changes will improve the overall operation of the program and also bring the current mandatory (country of origin labeling) requirements into compliance with the U.S. international trade obligations,” USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack said in a statement.

The National Farmers Union praised the rule change as an “excellent response.”

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Filed under Canada, COOL Country of origin labeling, CPG, Farming, Food, Made in America, Made in USA, Mexico, Product of USA Tagged with , , , , , ,

Europeans want U.S. to Ditch “Buy American” Rules

March 13, 2013 by Leave a comment

CPA Logo 2

Obama keeps pushing a Trans Atlantic trade deal with Europe, despite the fact that other trade deals have helped make the trade deficit worse.

One of the goals for Europeans is to get rid of Buy American rules in the U.S.

In particular, the [European Union] wants to pry open so-called public procurement markets and scrap “Buy American” clauses that restrict the ability of European companies to sell goods and services to states and cities.

The U.S. public strongly believes their taxpayer dollars should be spent procuring from U.S. companies and workers.  A majority in Congress votes for Buy American rules in infrastructure and other bills.  Rep. Dan Lipinski (D-IL) and Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) have been leading the efforts recently.  How can a fiscal stimulus have an impact if we buy foreign goods with taxpayer money?  That’s one difference between the FDR stimulus of the Great Depression and the smaller Obama stimulus of the Great Recession… offshore leakage of the government spending.

It’s not surprising that Europe wants to replace U.S. businesses and workers in government contracts.  The U.S. federal government is the biggest consumer in the world… and when you add in the state and local governments, it’s really big.  From the U.S. side there is simply no way we’d come away with a net benefit with theoretical market access by our so-called “U.S.” multinationals (who don’t really consider themselves U.S. anymore) to other smaller government procurement markets.  It simply doesn’t ever work that way.

I’m not sure where the Obama Administration is coming from on this.  The biggest source of jobs and growth will come from reducing the trade deficit.  We had a record $735B goods trade deficit last year, including a $300B goods deficit with China.  Trade deals simply don’t help the trade deficit, usually make things worse, and tie our hands for fixing the problem.

 

Source: http://www.tradereform.org/2013/03/europeans-want-u-s-to-ditch-buy-american-rules/

Filed under American made CHIC, COOL Country of origin labeling, EU, Government, Made in America, Made in USA, Manufacturing Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Cyberattacks, N. Korea, jihadist groups top U.S. threats

March 13, 2013 by Leave a comment

Cyberattacks

By Chelsea J. Carter, Pam Benson and Mariano Castillo, CNN

Washington (CNN) – Cyberattacks pose more of a threat to the United States than a land-based attack by a terrorist group, while North Korea’s development of a nuclear weapons program poses a “serious threat,” the director of national intelligence told Congress on Tuesday.

The warning by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper came in his annual report to Congress on the threats facing the United States.

“Attacks, which might involve cyber and financial weapons, can be deniable and unattributable,” Clapper said in prepared remarks before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. “Destruction can be invisible, latent and progressive.”

The Internet is increasingly being used as a tool both by nations and terror groups to achieve their objectives, according to Clapper’s report.

However, there is only a “remote chance” of a major cyberattack on the United States that would cause widespread disruptions, such as regional power outages, the report says. Most countries or groups don’t have the capacity to pull it off.

While Clapper emphasized possible cyberthreats, committee members raised questions about the potential nuclear dangers posed by North Korea and Iran, the increasing prevalence of al Qaeda in Syria and the effect of cuts to the U.S. budget on intelligence activities.

President Obama cracks whip on cybercrime

‘Belligerent rhetoric’

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Filed under China, COOL Country of origin labeling, CPG, Currency Manipulation, Made in America, Made in USA, Military, Political, Russia Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Made in the USA: More Consumers Buying American

March 7, 2013 by Leave a comment

Chris Rank | Bloomberg | Getty Images

A curious thing is happening among American shoppers. More people are taking a moment to flip over an item or fish for a label and ask, is it “Made in the USA?”

Walmart, the nation’s largest retailer, earlier this year announced it will boost sourcing of U.S. products by $50 billion during the next 10 years. General Electricis investing $1 billion through 2014 to revitalize its U.S. appliances business and create more than 1,500 U.S. jobs.

Mom-and-pops are also engineering entire business strategies devoted to locally made goods — everything from toys to housewares. And it’s not simply patriotism and desire for perceived safer products which are altering shopping habits.

The recession, and still flat recovery for many Americans, have created a painful realization. All those cheap goods made in China and elsewhere come at a price — lost U.S. manufacturing jobs. A growing pocket of consumers, in fact, are connecting the economic dots between their shopping carts — brimming with foreign-made stuff — and America’s future.

They’re calculating the trade-offs of paying a little more for locally-made goods.“The Great Recession certainly brought that home, and highlighted the fact that so many jobs have been lost,” said James Cerruti, senior partner for strategy and research at consulting firm Brandlogic. “People have become aware of that.”

“‘Made in the USA’ is known for one thing, quality,” said Robert von Goeben, co-founder of California-based Green Toys. All of their products from teething toys to blocks are made domestically and shipped to 75 countries.

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Filed under Apparel, Business, COOL Country of origin labeling, Insourcing, Internet, Jobs, Made in America, Made in USA Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , ,

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