> The only difference? One was labeled “Made in Asia” and priced at $129. The other, “Made in the USA,” at $239. [85% more expensive]
> And many are willing to pay a premium for domestically made goods. Nearly half (48%) say they’d be willing to pay around 10–20% more. 17% say they’d be willing to pay ~30% more for an American-made product over an imported one. - https://www.retailbrew.com/stories/2022/07/28/consumers-will...
The article does not say how many would pay 85% more, but since the number more than halved from 10% to 30% more, I would hazard not many.
I suspect that those folks who answer survey questions of "would you pay more for made in the USA" with "yes" are thinking (if they are thinking at all) of paying $2 to $3 more on a $100 item, not paying $110 more on a $100 item.
None of the surveys are ever crafted to ask: "How much more would you pay for a $100 item for 'made in the USA'?".
It is largely pointless, in general, to survey people about how much they would pay for things. Taking such answers seriously has led a lot of companies to ruin. The whole point of pricing is that no one knows how much something is worth until it is actually selling (or not).
Quality is also an undefined variable, because people may pay 10% more for an American made product that is of comparable quality, but they may also be willing to pay 110% more if the Asian counterpart is poor quality.
When you’re using the same exact photos, there’s no discernible quality difference.
The survey already used percentages. As for not thinking - it would seem to me worrying about the effects of one's purchases on the local economy, and the knock-on effects this has on sovereignty and politics, takes more thought than just short-sightedly picking the cheaper option no matter what.
Legroom is mostly overpriced, people would be more willing to pay if it was properly priced. Paying 50% more doesn't get you 50% more area in the plane.
Americans in the market for a "premium" shower head are clearly not looking for the cheapest thing on the market. So it's obvious that they would be willing to spend more for the added feel-good of a domestic product.
As a Canadian, "Made in the USA" is currently a mark against, and I would only consider buying that product if it was absolutely the only remotely reasonable option.
As an American, I’m doing what I can to boycott stuff made in red states. I can and do pay up to 2x more for blue state stuff (which is typically higher quality, to be honest), and go imported otherwise.
I will still buy American made stuff for sure no matter who is in power there. It doesn't matter to me. The quality of the product is what matters to me.
Between a trade war, abuse by border services, threats of annexation, economic instability taking a dump on my retirement and cost of living. For sure. I have conferences, memories in Hawaii, family in the US and I ain’t going. I actually hope life in the US becomes more uncomfortable for the average person for a while so the ideology driving MAGA becomes persona non grata for a generation or two. I’ll vote the only way I can: my money. -a slighted Canadian.
This article is completely non-rigorous and doesn't mean anything, but it shows what "simple" thinking about problems leads to. They would have had to gather enough data points to determine the price that people would pay to be meaningful in just about any way.
This is why it's important to have academic rigor and people who study specific problems deeply in positions of power. This ignores potential economies of scale cost reductions and paying more for home made products is circularly dependent on earning more from selling those higher cost products.
I think the most interesting question by far in this space is what percent of every purchase ends up going to housing, food, or health care. If you buy a burger, what percent of the cost of that burger is going directly into housing via the workers wages?
> to determine the price that people would pay to be meaningful in just about any way
Not convinced that would be meaningful, but even if it was, it'd be totally useless if you can't actually manufacture items in the US with less overhead than what this company managed.
Saying "people would have bought it if it was only 35% more for the same item" is not helpful if it's not possible to profitably manufacture them at 35% more than in China.
The greater context is tariffs. Tariffs make foreign products more expensive. If everyone is willing to pay 1% more for the benefit of their own economy, then a 1% tariff probably wouldn't be very unpopular, it might even be responsible, especially if that money is then immediately invested in helping the given industry grow.
It's a measurement of the pain of tariffs or a measurement of how many people would "willingly" pay a tariff.
Of course that assumes a low corruption government with informed and forward looking policy, rather than past looking policy. Tariffs as they are frequently exist so that our own companies don't have to compete as hard and are able to spend their money on stock buybacks rather than investing into R&D, or to choose winners and losers allowing a tariff wielding king to reward loyalty or punish dissent.
I am absolutely a layman though, and this is my layman understanding.
If the current policymakers are operating on vibes and simplistic reasoning, then it seems reasonable that this business merely refutes those vibes and misguided reasoning with simplistic evidence. They aren't presenting the post as a rigorous academic study.
The comment that users might see the US option as a scam is interesting. It would have been interesting to offer an info modal for the US item or ask for feedback from users who added the US item to their carts. Still not the rigorous study you seem to be expecting, but some extra info.
I wonder how valid that test is, actually. Lots of people are aware that claims of "Made in USA" often don't actually mean the thing was made in the USA in the intuitive sense of the phrase and so disregard them.
Regardless, I would fully expect that most people would be swayed by price, especially when the price differential is as large as in that test.
After so many good brand names have been hollowed out, I am extremely skeptical that “Made in America” is anything but a sticker slapped on one SKU from the same factory line.
Given that all products need to make that mark is to be assembled in the country its something that has clearly been manipulated as a marketing strategy too often now and its certainly a part of the issue.
Disclaimer: I don’t think the current admin policies are a good way to bring back American manufacturing, if that is their main goal.
One point I don’t see discussed much is how American physical goods companies currently don’t really have access to the huge bottom chunk of the price pyramid. This limits the benefits of scale, and makes their products more expensive than they would be otherwise.
Right now if someone starts a small physical product company in America, they pretty much have to target people with excess discretionary spending ability. Once they go for the lower part of the pyramid that is much more price sensitive, they get killed by foreign competition on labor and environmental compliance costs that the American company has to pay and the foreign company does not.
If American manufacturing ever does come back, I would expect prices to come down significantly simply due to again having access to market scale.
In actuality the bottom chunk of the price pyramid being off limits is because of American business policy, not because of outside competition.
A staggering amount of Americans live around the poverty line and even more live paycheck to paycheck. They can only afford goods that are, effectively, priced at how much we value their labor in the US.
In order to solve this problem we'd need to actually raise the minimum wage and ensure Americans have more discretionary income to afford American products. But that'll never happen because businesses don't want to eat into their profit margins, so they just permanently lock themselves out of a market. It's a sort of tragedy of the markets issue.
another issue is that at least in the short term, the "made in america" sticker is likely to be detrimental in many foreign markets
so, it might make sense for US companies selling to US customers, if they can find suppliers. but even in the cases where it works for that market, multinational companies might prefer a "made in taiwan" or "made in mexico" sticker, or they might prefer to leave the sticker off
High end discretionary consumer looking for Made in the US makes me think of something like Rogue Fitness or Room&Board. A normally Made in China/Vietnam brand specifically pointing out that they found some small third-party manufacturer that will provide the same quality you're getting from Asia (the implicit assumption is that this means low quality) is kind of priming people to not buy it.
Well, speaking from personal experience as a high end discretionary consumer, I buy almost exclusively products made in USA or Europe. So unless the companies I buy from have no customers other than me, there is some slice of the market where this is working today.
This is, of course, a puff piece of writing. You don't have to look further than this phrase: _"The new unit cost us nearly 3x more to produce. To maintain our margins, we’d have to sell it for $239."_
How else does 2x become 3x, unless you're trying to make your burden sound more dramatic. uug. But what interests me in this discussion is the phrase _"maintain our margins"_. American companies off-shored manufacturing to maintain their margins. Now they have a taste of that cheap foreign labor, its oh so difficult to come back cheerfully to manufacture in the US.
> "If policymakers and pundits want to rebuild American industry, they need to grapple with this truth: idealism doesn’t always survive contact with a price tag."
I suspect the vast majority of customers will go with the cheaper option, unless there's a quality advantage for the more expensive one (which I don't think there is in this case?).
There's also a difference between "made in" and "assembled in" in other cases (but not sure that applies in this case?).
I favor “made in [almost any OECD state]” (not just the USA) for goods I care about and plan to have a long time precisely because it’s a decent quality marker. It doesn’t make sense to shave a few pennies on materials and processes here and there when labor’s so expensive that you can’t compete on price anyway.
If you just tell me, or imply that, “these are identically made and QC’d, and made with the same amount and quality of materials, but made in two different countries” I’ll just take the cheaper one. Especially if the price difference is as large as in this experiment, JFC.
For garments at least, you _can_ have affordable, Made in US by unionised labour products [1], if you cut your margins.
People complain about CoGs but let’s be real, a lot of products imported have crazy margins put on them by the middleman. You’ve probably seen “I bought this off Alibaba for $.50 and reselling for $25”
It's not sincere. People in different countries do pay more for local, or ethically sourced, or other principled factors but it has to be a reasonable increase.
Putting a ridiculous, almost 2x raise in such a way and pretending it's a gotcha is disingenuous.
but these increases in price aren't set arbitrarily - they're calculated based on cost and profit margin. you can't just claim that a 2x price increase is ridiculous with no context.
It's almost impossible to justify a significant percentage increase in price based solely on a questionable declaration of manufacturing location.
There should be a quality improvement that goes along with the location and price increase. And that used to be the impression, but I don't think that's the case anymore. "Made in the USA" used to mean that it was a quality product, not a cheap knockoff. Now the meaning is not so clear. Hasn't been for a long time.
The text says specifically that the quality is identical no matter where the product was manufactured. When people say they'd pay more for American made products, I think they mean it in the context of what that used to imply, not that they're going to pay nearly double for exactly the same quality.
> There should be a quality improvement that goes along with the location and price increase.
> what that used to imply
This last part hits the nail on the head. The quality difference is mostly a fantasy. While the long tail of random aliexpress/temu junk suggests there's some big quality difference, it's more that those are random small businesses operating without any regulations, reputational concern, or legal liability and incentivized to make stuff cheap.
If you think about the things most people buy from real brands, the quality argument against Asia is preposterous, since not only are the products made in Asia quite high quality, but America has essentially zero slack in the skilled labor market as it is. We literally could not build a device to the quality standards of Apple or Samsung because everyone in America who could conceivably do so already has a job building cars or specialized, very expensive industrial products.
Now, people do complain that everything is crappy and made to fall apart just as the 90-365 day warranties expire. But that's not China being too dumb to make it correctly -- it's made perfectly to spec most of the time. It's the designers of the products (often in the US) optimizing their profits by using the cheapest, worst parts and unrepairable designs. If anything, moving production to a high-labor-cost country would increase the pressure to cut any corner possible.
JB Smuckers does. They lobbied hard for tarrifs and donated heavily to Trump.
Imported jam like Bonne Maman has been killing them. They claim it’s due to unfair pricing or something, but I suspect it’s because of the HFCS, trans fats and other crap they’ve put in their products over the years.
There are other reasons businesses might go to other locales other than price. Capability is the obvious big one, some capabilities aren’t possible at any price. Regulatory environment is another.
I don't understand why people are so incredulous that virtue signalling is rampant and even the "good guys" (whatever group you want to attribute that to) is mostly full of people who know the right thing to say, will gladly say it repeatedly to garner praise, but will not follow it when it comes to them.
Me, or anyone else who has tried a "virtuous venture", could have easily told this company not to waste their time. The take away here isn't "they screwed this up" or "This isn't a true test". The takeaway is "People are extremely self serving when the perceived impact is small and no one is there to judge them for it." Plan your business accordingly.
While not directly indicated in this article, I won't conclude that the experiment is useless. Presenting the option educates the consumer of what prices are like under tariffs.
Yeah, people are gawkimg at the examples and don't realize that yes, these are the legitimate costs for trying to move local immediately. You don't just "catch up" to the decades of investment China spent on manufacturing. And that catch up will be expensive.
I absolutely pay more for local goods. In the grocery store I try to purchase things from my state, or at least adjacent states. If it’s something that will last for decades or something I will use constantly I will absolutely pay more for made in US, Canada or Mexico.
But, this study feels a bit off - as much as Americans aspire to be wealthy, the vast majority are not and have to make compromises and can’t always justify paying double for something out of some economic or emotional principle.
Of course, I learned a long time ago that “stuff” does very little for my quality of life so I try not to be acquisitive. Except for guitars, sigh.
This doesn't surprise me. As much as I would love to buy locally made products, in my economic condition I have to stretch my dollar as far as it can go. If it is the difference between buying a Dyson vs a XISXKE, well the Dyson is better for my money. But for the same shower head, that product will not scream quality unless I'm in the market to buy a higher end product. I may emotionally respond with, nobody else in the USA is supporting locally made products, why should I?
I will however go out of my way to buy Canadian over American out of spite.
Given how gutted the regulatory agencies are today, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see surge in fraudulent claims of “Made in USA” items that actually trace manufacturing to another country.
The choice between Made in Asia and Made in the USA can be more complicated. For instance, I will acknowledge that 85% of price difference is a lot, but then I'd rather own less stuff: less clothing, less food, certainly no goodie bags. If anything, I hate that the house is filled with stuff that family members bought for now good reason except this jolt of pleasure at the time of purchase.
The thing is, if made in the USA does not come with a better, greener or more ethical, who cares?!
Water filtration is an area where sophisticated customers want the best filter that meets usage requirements and budgets! If you double the cost, and there’s no extra quality improvement, you’re SOL.
also: proprietary in a shower head is at best some sort of activated charcoal plus some spices. I did some reading after my sister and her husband got an osmotic filter plus de fluoridation for their pending infants. The reading gave me the take away that for good filtration you have a tough time actually doing a good job unless you’re using an osmotic filter plus filter media where the water has a long dwell time. Some of this is touched on in a recent prject farm video. Point being a filter in the shower head isn’t doing much nor efficiently.
I’m honestly surprised so many comments here are nitpicking or expressing skepticism about this little test.
Low price vs foreign sourcing has been tested trillions of times over decades and low price largely won. How do you think we got to the supply chains and economy we have today? How do you think Walmart (which started off selling Made in USA BTW) and Dollar Tree and Target and Amazon etc. got so big?
People like low prices. They like them more than a lot of other things they also like.
We got to the supply chains and economy we have today through a large number of free trade deals, whose opponents correctly predicted that they would drive a low price vs. foreign sourcing dynamic eventually leaving domestic manufacturing uncompetitive for many products. I'm not skeptical of the test results at all.
> This wasn’t a failure of marketing—it was a referendum on price.
I don't think so. Not only is the price almost double, but there no way to discern the USA version, and the disclaimer says that some materials cannot be sourced in the USA.
A consumer that isn't price sensitive and wants made in the USA would still obviously reject this.
I imagine zero people care about the manufacturing provenance of their shower-head and many other household utility items. This is just hot-button-issue glommering marketing fluff.
FWIW, such country-of-origin labels are largely misleading when it comes to most durable goods which, by design, are made up of an amalgam of parts sourced from multiple supply chains.
It seems to me that this is not a fair test. There is sentiment and there is budget. A product that costs a little more is one thing but double the price hits budget barriers. Most people do not have 80%+ discretionary budget.
Everytime I think of made in USA, I'm reminded of Americans Italian and Irish mobs racking up prices on repairs of everything from cars to appliances so high that it even drove people into the streets.
> Our bestselling model—manufactured in Asia (China and Vietnam)—sells for $129. But this year, as tariffs jumped from 25% to 170%, we wondered: Could we reshore manufacturing to the U.S. while maintaining margins to keep our lights on?
This is disingenuous. According to Amazon price tracking, the price was $129 in 2024 as well, so they are apparently not maintaining margins on the China made product.
The question wasn’t “can we maintain our margin,” the question was “can we manufacture in the US with the same margin we used to enjoy?”
The whole thing is a stunt designed to focus ire against tariffs, but let’s not mischaracterize their point: manufacturing in the US is much more expensive than manufacturing in Asia.
I honestly believe if the Trump administration really intends to bring manufactuing back to the US, a permanent double-digit/3-digit tariff and a stable regime of 8+ years will do the trick. Companies will be able to plan accordingly.
But, if the tariff keeps changing on a daily basis with no one sure of his ultimate goal, and the fact that there is a four-year term limit which significant limits visibility beyond that, companies couldn't make such decision. It takes more than four years to build a factory and get it into stable operations.
I think it is an A/B test, as you described, based on this part:
> We created a secret landing page. The product and design were identical. The only difference? One was labeled “Made in Asia” and priced at $129. The other, “Made in the USA,” at $239.
It's odd that they changed the text AND nearly doubled the price. They seem to attribute the conversion rate dropping to the text change, though.
One of the first lessons people learn in many fields and walks of life: People's declared preferences are often radically opposed to their revealed preferences.
"Revealed preferences" should really be called "revealed behaviors".
"Sure this alcoholic says he wants to quit booze, but when we put a discount liquor shelf at the checkout where he shops for groceries, he started buying whiskey again. What a hypocrite!"
I've been amazed recently by 2 shower heads. My grandmas shower has VERY low water output from the lower spigot, but flowing through the showerhead you would never know it. They replaced a showerhead at the gym recently and the flow/coverage is amazing. I want one like that in my next house, or maybe this one lol.
It consistently amazes me how much other people seem to not give a shit about appliances/tools. Everything seems to be low-lifespan garbage or have a fatal flaw or be over-featured and inconvenient to use or have inexplicable design. It seems like even the businesses who are actually trying still have issues - like all generational knowledge is gone.
> The only difference? One was labeled “Made in Asia” and priced at $129. The other, “Made in the USA,” at $239. [85% more expensive]
> And many are willing to pay a premium for domestically made goods. Nearly half (48%) say they’d be willing to pay around 10–20% more. 17% say they’d be willing to pay ~30% more for an American-made product over an imported one. - https://www.retailbrew.com/stories/2022/07/28/consumers-will...
The article does not say how many would pay 85% more, but since the number more than halved from 10% to 30% more, I would hazard not many.
I suspect that those folks who answer survey questions of "would you pay more for made in the USA" with "yes" are thinking (if they are thinking at all) of paying $2 to $3 more on a $100 item, not paying $110 more on a $100 item.
None of the surveys are ever crafted to ask: "How much more would you pay for a $100 item for 'made in the USA'?".
It is largely pointless, in general, to survey people about how much they would pay for things. Taking such answers seriously has led a lot of companies to ruin. The whole point of pricing is that no one knows how much something is worth until it is actually selling (or not).
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Quality is also an undefined variable, because people may pay 10% more for an American made product that is of comparable quality, but they may also be willing to pay 110% more if the Asian counterpart is poor quality.
When you’re using the same exact photos, there’s no discernible quality difference.
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The survey already used percentages. As for not thinking - it would seem to me worrying about the effects of one's purchases on the local economy, and the knock-on effects this has on sovereignty and politics, takes more thought than just short-sightedly picking the cheaper option no matter what.
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> Nearly half (48%) say they’d be willing to pay around 10–20% more.
$110-120 for a $100 item, no?
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It's like when people say they'll pay extra for more legroom but only book the cheapest possible tickets.
Legroom is mostly overpriced, people would be more willing to pay if it was properly priced. Paying 50% more doesn't get you 50% more area in the plane.
£70 on a £100 ticket? Yeah no wonder! They're too poor after paying £100 for a checked bag
Or long haul premium economy which is just absurdly priced now, often 100-200% more than economy.
I’ve never done that - I have flown a lot in my life, much of it internationally and the flight times / fewest number of layovers trumps cost.
Americans in the market for a "premium" shower head are clearly not looking for the cheapest thing on the market. So it's obvious that they would be willing to spend more for the added feel-good of a domestic product.
As a Canadian, "Made in the USA" is currently a mark against, and I would only consider buying that product if it was absolutely the only remotely reasonable option.
As an American, I’m doing what I can to boycott stuff made in red states. I can and do pay up to 2x more for blue state stuff (which is typically higher quality, to be honest), and go imported otherwise.
What kind of stuff made in red states are you boycotting?
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This. We're car shopping right now and not only searching for non-US brands but also specific models not made in US factories.
I don't blame you. Our next president is going to have send you a Statue of Liberty or something to patch things up.
I'd rather the next president spends most of their term making sure this kind of crisis can never happen again.
We can send the statue of Shame the term after that.
I will still buy American made stuff for sure no matter who is in power there. It doesn't matter to me. The quality of the product is what matters to me.
You would rather "Made in China" over "Made in the USA?"
Between a trade war, abuse by border services, threats of annexation, economic instability taking a dump on my retirement and cost of living. For sure. I have conferences, memories in Hawaii, family in the US and I ain’t going. I actually hope life in the US becomes more uncomfortable for the average person for a while so the ideology driving MAGA becomes persona non grata for a generation or two. I’ll vote the only way I can: my money. -a slighted Canadian.
China hasn't threatened to make Canada a Chinese province so given no friendly alternative, I'd 100% buy the Chinese model.
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Well, I mean, China isn't currently threatening to invade Canada, so there's that.
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At this point, that is a pretty popular sentiment in Canada.
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Yes, 100% absolutely.
Absolutely.
Yes.
I absolutely won't be buying anything made in America, regardless of price. America is now an ideological enemy of the liberal Western order.
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Not sure that it's a fair test, tbh.
I try to buy 'locally made' products because I respect the story of their company, and their efforts to build up some type of community.
If I had a choice between 'made here' or 'made there' at the checkout stage, then I'd probably think it's a bit of a scam.
I think 'locally made' is a business choice, not a product choice.
I always like to give this Welsh jeans firm as an example: https://hiutdenim.co.uk/ (sorry if it's advertising, I've no connection to them).
This article is completely non-rigorous and doesn't mean anything, but it shows what "simple" thinking about problems leads to. They would have had to gather enough data points to determine the price that people would pay to be meaningful in just about any way.
This is why it's important to have academic rigor and people who study specific problems deeply in positions of power. This ignores potential economies of scale cost reductions and paying more for home made products is circularly dependent on earning more from selling those higher cost products.
I think the most interesting question by far in this space is what percent of every purchase ends up going to housing, food, or health care. If you buy a burger, what percent of the cost of that burger is going directly into housing via the workers wages?
> to determine the price that people would pay to be meaningful in just about any way
Not convinced that would be meaningful, but even if it was, it'd be totally useless if you can't actually manufacture items in the US with less overhead than what this company managed.
Saying "people would have bought it if it was only 35% more for the same item" is not helpful if it's not possible to profitably manufacture them at 35% more than in China.
The greater context is tariffs. Tariffs make foreign products more expensive. If everyone is willing to pay 1% more for the benefit of their own economy, then a 1% tariff probably wouldn't be very unpopular, it might even be responsible, especially if that money is then immediately invested in helping the given industry grow.
It's a measurement of the pain of tariffs or a measurement of how many people would "willingly" pay a tariff.
Of course that assumes a low corruption government with informed and forward looking policy, rather than past looking policy. Tariffs as they are frequently exist so that our own companies don't have to compete as hard and are able to spend their money on stock buybacks rather than investing into R&D, or to choose winners and losers allowing a tariff wielding king to reward loyalty or punish dissent.
I am absolutely a layman though, and this is my layman understanding.
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If the current policymakers are operating on vibes and simplistic reasoning, then it seems reasonable that this business merely refutes those vibes and misguided reasoning with simplistic evidence. They aren't presenting the post as a rigorous academic study.
The comment that users might see the US option as a scam is interesting. It would have been interesting to offer an info modal for the US item or ask for feedback from users who added the US item to their carts. Still not the rigorous study you seem to be expecting, but some extra info.
They didn't care to do a serious microeconomics analysis. They just wanted to go with a specific narrative.
But they can’t make the product for that price so what’s the point?
I wonder how valid that test is, actually. Lots of people are aware that claims of "Made in USA" often don't actually mean the thing was made in the USA in the intuitive sense of the phrase and so disregard them.
Regardless, I would fully expect that most people would be swayed by price, especially when the price differential is as large as in that test.
After so many good brand names have been hollowed out, I am extremely skeptical that “Made in America” is anything but a sticker slapped on one SKU from the same factory line.
FWIW, that would be illegal -- nontrivially so.
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Given that all products need to make that mark is to be assembled in the country its something that has clearly been manipulated as a marketing strategy too often now and its certainly a part of the issue.
or Guam, Puerto Rico, and American Samoa, which are technically part of the US, but aren't, say, Kansas.
Disclaimer: I don’t think the current admin policies are a good way to bring back American manufacturing, if that is their main goal.
One point I don’t see discussed much is how American physical goods companies currently don’t really have access to the huge bottom chunk of the price pyramid. This limits the benefits of scale, and makes their products more expensive than they would be otherwise.
Right now if someone starts a small physical product company in America, they pretty much have to target people with excess discretionary spending ability. Once they go for the lower part of the pyramid that is much more price sensitive, they get killed by foreign competition on labor and environmental compliance costs that the American company has to pay and the foreign company does not.
If American manufacturing ever does come back, I would expect prices to come down significantly simply due to again having access to market scale.
In actuality the bottom chunk of the price pyramid being off limits is because of American business policy, not because of outside competition.
A staggering amount of Americans live around the poverty line and even more live paycheck to paycheck. They can only afford goods that are, effectively, priced at how much we value their labor in the US.
In order to solve this problem we'd need to actually raise the minimum wage and ensure Americans have more discretionary income to afford American products. But that'll never happen because businesses don't want to eat into their profit margins, so they just permanently lock themselves out of a market. It's a sort of tragedy of the markets issue.
Is the Chinese minimum wage so much better then, that China does not have this problem?
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another issue is that at least in the short term, the "made in america" sticker is likely to be detrimental in many foreign markets
so, it might make sense for US companies selling to US customers, if they can find suppliers. but even in the cases where it works for that market, multinational companies might prefer a "made in taiwan" or "made in mexico" sticker, or they might prefer to leave the sticker off
A filtering shower head is already targeting the high end discretionary consumer.
They didn’t bite.
High end discretionary consumer looking for Made in the US makes me think of something like Rogue Fitness or Room&Board. A normally Made in China/Vietnam brand specifically pointing out that they found some small third-party manufacturer that will provide the same quality you're getting from Asia (the implicit assumption is that this means low quality) is kind of priming people to not buy it.
Well, speaking from personal experience as a high end discretionary consumer, I buy almost exclusively products made in USA or Europe. So unless the companies I buy from have no customers other than me, there is some slice of the market where this is working today.
This is, of course, a puff piece of writing. You don't have to look further than this phrase: _"The new unit cost us nearly 3x more to produce. To maintain our margins, we’d have to sell it for $239."_
How else does 2x become 3x, unless you're trying to make your burden sound more dramatic. uug. But what interests me in this discussion is the phrase _"maintain our margins"_. American companies off-shored manufacturing to maintain their margins. Now they have a taste of that cheap foreign labor, its oh so difficult to come back cheerfully to manufacture in the US.
> "If policymakers and pundits want to rebuild American industry, they need to grapple with this truth: idealism doesn’t always survive contact with a price tag."
Or, business' foreign labor priced margins.
I suspect the vast majority of customers will go with the cheaper option, unless there's a quality advantage for the more expensive one (which I don't think there is in this case?).
There's also a difference between "made in" and "assembled in" in other cases (but not sure that applies in this case?).
I favor “made in [almost any OECD state]” (not just the USA) for goods I care about and plan to have a long time precisely because it’s a decent quality marker. It doesn’t make sense to shave a few pennies on materials and processes here and there when labor’s so expensive that you can’t compete on price anyway.
If you just tell me, or imply that, “these are identically made and QC’d, and made with the same amount and quality of materials, but made in two different countries” I’ll just take the cheaper one. Especially if the price difference is as large as in this experiment, JFC.
For garments at least, you _can_ have affordable, Made in US by unionised labour products [1], if you cut your margins.
People complain about CoGs but let’s be real, a lot of products imported have crazy margins put on them by the middleman. You’ve probably seen “I bought this off Alibaba for $.50 and reselling for $25”
[1] https://ideologie.shop
Thank you sincerely for running this experiment. Unfortunately, we didn't learn anything new.
People buy cheap. They don't buy quality, they don't buy local, they don't buy green: they buy cheap.
It's not sincere. People in different countries do pay more for local, or ethically sourced, or other principled factors but it has to be a reasonable increase.
Putting a ridiculous, almost 2x raise in such a way and pretending it's a gotcha is disingenuous.
This would have been a more interesting discussion if either of you provided any actual metrics. Which this article actually does.
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but these increases in price aren't set arbitrarily - they're calculated based on cost and profit margin. you can't just claim that a 2x price increase is ridiculous with no context.
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It takes more than a slogan.
It's almost impossible to justify a significant percentage increase in price based solely on a questionable declaration of manufacturing location.
There should be a quality improvement that goes along with the location and price increase. And that used to be the impression, but I don't think that's the case anymore. "Made in the USA" used to mean that it was a quality product, not a cheap knockoff. Now the meaning is not so clear. Hasn't been for a long time.
The text says specifically that the quality is identical no matter where the product was manufactured. When people say they'd pay more for American made products, I think they mean it in the context of what that used to imply, not that they're going to pay nearly double for exactly the same quality.
> There should be a quality improvement that goes along with the location and price increase.
> what that used to imply
This last part hits the nail on the head. The quality difference is mostly a fantasy. While the long tail of random aliexpress/temu junk suggests there's some big quality difference, it's more that those are random small businesses operating without any regulations, reputational concern, or legal liability and incentivized to make stuff cheap.
If you think about the things most people buy from real brands, the quality argument against Asia is preposterous, since not only are the products made in Asia quite high quality, but America has essentially zero slack in the skilled labor market as it is. We literally could not build a device to the quality standards of Apple or Samsung because everyone in America who could conceivably do so already has a job building cars or specialized, very expensive industrial products.
Now, people do complain that everything is crappy and made to fall apart just as the 90-365 day warranties expire. But that's not China being too dumb to make it correctly -- it's made perfectly to spec most of the time. It's the designers of the products (often in the US) optimizing their profits by using the cheapest, worst parts and unrepairable designs. If anything, moving production to a high-labor-cost country would increase the pressure to cut any corner possible.
The slogan matters.
"Look for the union label" meant a lot to Americans back when there were unions.
The slogan matters as much as the people care. Sadly there's a lot of Apathy, if not outright hate, for the fellow American as of late.
If people would spend more for the US product, we wouldn't need the tariffs.
Nobody needs the current round of tariffs regardless of that. This is a completely made-up situation.
JB Smuckers does. They lobbied hard for tarrifs and donated heavily to Trump.
Imported jam like Bonne Maman has been killing them. They claim it’s due to unfair pricing or something, but I suspect it’s because of the HFCS, trans fats and other crap they’ve put in their products over the years.
There are other reasons businesses might go to other locales other than price. Capability is the obvious big one, some capabilities aren’t possible at any price. Regulatory environment is another.
We don't need the tarrifs regardless.
I don't understand why people are so incredulous that virtue signalling is rampant and even the "good guys" (whatever group you want to attribute that to) is mostly full of people who know the right thing to say, will gladly say it repeatedly to garner praise, but will not follow it when it comes to them.
Me, or anyone else who has tried a "virtuous venture", could have easily told this company not to waste their time. The take away here isn't "they screwed this up" or "This isn't a true test". The takeaway is "People are extremely self serving when the perceived impact is small and no one is there to judge them for it." Plan your business accordingly.
While not directly indicated in this article, I won't conclude that the experiment is useless. Presenting the option educates the consumer of what prices are like under tariffs.
Yeah, people are gawkimg at the examples and don't realize that yes, these are the legitimate costs for trying to move local immediately. You don't just "catch up" to the decades of investment China spent on manufacturing. And that catch up will be expensive.
I absolutely pay more for local goods. In the grocery store I try to purchase things from my state, or at least adjacent states. If it’s something that will last for decades or something I will use constantly I will absolutely pay more for made in US, Canada or Mexico.
But, this study feels a bit off - as much as Americans aspire to be wealthy, the vast majority are not and have to make compromises and can’t always justify paying double for something out of some economic or emotional principle.
Of course, I learned a long time ago that “stuff” does very little for my quality of life so I try not to be acquisitive. Except for guitars, sigh.
This doesn't surprise me. As much as I would love to buy locally made products, in my economic condition I have to stretch my dollar as far as it can go. If it is the difference between buying a Dyson vs a XISXKE, well the Dyson is better for my money. But for the same shower head, that product will not scream quality unless I'm in the market to buy a higher end product. I may emotionally respond with, nobody else in the USA is supporting locally made products, why should I? I will however go out of my way to buy Canadian over American out of spite.
Also 'crapification'. I currently have a low amount of trust of product quality wherever it might be manufactured.
Given how gutted the regulatory agencies are today, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see surge in fraudulent claims of “Made in USA” items that actually trace manufacturing to another country.
Maybe “Made in USA, China”
Background: fake story about a town in Japan changing its name to USA
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/made-in-usa/
The choice between Made in Asia and Made in the USA can be more complicated. For instance, I will acknowledge that 85% of price difference is a lot, but then I'd rather own less stuff: less clothing, less food, certainly no goodie bags. If anything, I hate that the house is filled with stuff that family members bought for now good reason except this jolt of pleasure at the time of purchase.
I strongly suspect many items marked with things like "made proudly in the USA" type items are about to be show to have non-US sources.
They should have lowered the cost of the USA product over multiple days to find the price point at which people would choose it.
The thing is, if made in the USA does not come with a better, greener or more ethical, who cares?!
Water filtration is an area where sophisticated customers want the best filter that meets usage requirements and budgets! If you double the cost, and there’s no extra quality improvement, you’re SOL.
also: proprietary in a shower head is at best some sort of activated charcoal plus some spices. I did some reading after my sister and her husband got an osmotic filter plus de fluoridation for their pending infants. The reading gave me the take away that for good filtration you have a tough time actually doing a good job unless you’re using an osmotic filter plus filter media where the water has a long dwell time. Some of this is touched on in a recent prject farm video. Point being a filter in the shower head isn’t doing much nor efficiently.
I’m honestly surprised so many comments here are nitpicking or expressing skepticism about this little test.
Low price vs foreign sourcing has been tested trillions of times over decades and low price largely won. How do you think we got to the supply chains and economy we have today? How do you think Walmart (which started off selling Made in USA BTW) and Dollar Tree and Target and Amazon etc. got so big?
People like low prices. They like them more than a lot of other things they also like.
We got to the supply chains and economy we have today through a large number of free trade deals, whose opponents correctly predicted that they would drive a low price vs. foreign sourcing dynamic eventually leaving domestic manufacturing uncompetitive for many products. I'm not skeptical of the test results at all.
> This wasn’t a failure of marketing—it was a referendum on price.
I don't think so. Not only is the price almost double, but there no way to discern the USA version, and the disclaimer says that some materials cannot be sourced in the USA.
A consumer that isn't price sensitive and wants made in the USA would still obviously reject this.
This is why we need to transition the USD away from being the world reserve currency.
https://www.hudsonbaycapital.com/documents/FG/hudsonbay/rese...
I imagine zero people care about the manufacturing provenance of their shower-head and many other household utility items. This is just hot-button-issue glommering marketing fluff.
FWIW, such country-of-origin labels are largely misleading when it comes to most durable goods which, by design, are made up of an amalgam of parts sourced from multiple supply chains.
"To maintain our margins, we’d have to sell it for $239."
Here we have the issue. With tariffs many companies cannot maintain their margin. So they have to reduce their greed.
That is of course absolutely terrible and the real reason why every company complains about tariffs.
No company would care about higher prices if they could maintain their margin.
I would pay more for "made in the usa", but it usually goes along with a trusted brand, and usually for a product with decent design and durability.
Think snap-on hand tools or darn-touch socks.
There are plenty of brands that don't have much meaning behind them though, having cut costs or sold out.
It seems to me that this is not a fair test. There is sentiment and there is budget. A product that costs a little more is one thing but double the price hits budget barriers. Most people do not have 80%+ discretionary budget.
Everytime I think of made in USA, I'm reminded of Americans Italian and Irish mobs racking up prices on repairs of everything from cars to appliances so high that it even drove people into the streets.
I would pay more (up to the budget) if I knew I was getting a better product. I don't care where it was made.
No surprise with this test except a few people from the US bought made in USA. That was a bit of a surprise.
I wonder if the strikethrough had any subtle influence on the decision making
> Our bestselling model—manufactured in Asia (China and Vietnam)—sells for $129. But this year, as tariffs jumped from 25% to 170%, we wondered: Could we reshore manufacturing to the U.S. while maintaining margins to keep our lights on?
This is disingenuous. According to Amazon price tracking, the price was $129 in 2024 as well, so they are apparently not maintaining margins on the China made product.
The question wasn’t “can we maintain our margin,” the question was “can we manufacture in the US with the same margin we used to enjoy?”
The whole thing is a stunt designed to focus ire against tariffs, but let’s not mischaracterize their point: manufacturing in the US is much more expensive than manufacturing in Asia.
My understanding of what Trump is trying is forcing us to have no choice by making both versions insanely overpriced with overseas being more
I honestly believe if the Trump administration really intends to bring manufactuing back to the US, a permanent double-digit/3-digit tariff and a stable regime of 8+ years will do the trick. Companies will be able to plan accordingly.
But, if the tariff keeps changing on a daily basis with no one sure of his ultimate goal, and the fact that there is a four-year term limit which significant limits visibility beyond that, companies couldn't make such decision. It takes more than four years to build a factory and get it into stable operations.
> a four-year term limit
Apparently Trump doesn't think so.
MAGA and Trump don’t even make their hats in America
It’s all one big con
Trump does make the offical MAGA hats in the USA. Random people can and do import hats to sell at rallies and the like.
"Everyone"?
That's not an A/B test, it's a choice. A/B means, each one is displayed to different customers as the only option to then see who wanted what.
In this case, a choice is more insightful than A/B.
What I find more interesting is that people give a shit about shower heads.
I think it is an A/B test, as you described, based on this part:
> We created a secret landing page. The product and design were identical. The only difference? One was labeled “Made in Asia” and priced at $129. The other, “Made in the USA,” at $239.
It's odd that they changed the text AND nearly doubled the price. They seem to attribute the conversion rate dropping to the text change, though.
The post is unclear on this. I'm not sure where the "secret landing page" came into play here. They even show a screenshot with both options visible.
And they also say: "The visitors were given the choice to either buy the Made in USA or the Made in Asia version."
A/B would be randomly showing either ONLY the USA with higher price to some people and ONLY the cheaper Asian one to others.
However, even that isn't apples to apples as the price is obviously different.
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One of the first lessons people learn in many fields and walks of life: People's declared preferences are often radically opposed to their revealed preferences.
"Revealed preferences" should really be called "revealed behaviors".
"Sure this alcoholic says he wants to quit booze, but when we put a discount liquor shelf at the checkout where he shops for groceries, he started buying whiskey again. What a hypocrite!"
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Is there a way to successfully and repeatedly screen for this?
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I've been amazed recently by 2 shower heads. My grandmas shower has VERY low water output from the lower spigot, but flowing through the showerhead you would never know it. They replaced a showerhead at the gym recently and the flow/coverage is amazing. I want one like that in my next house, or maybe this one lol.
It consistently amazes me how much other people seem to not give a shit about appliances/tools. Everything seems to be low-lifespan garbage or have a fatal flaw or be over-featured and inconvenient to use or have inexplicable design. It seems like even the businesses who are actually trying still have issues - like all generational knowledge is gone.
Ask people with long hair how they feel about showerheads. It reveals a subgroup of users who tend to be more attentive out of self-interest.
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