No More Cheap Shipping for Chinese Sellers

Re:No More Cheap Shipping for Chinese Sellers by baybal2 on Tuesday August 27, 2019 @05:10PM (#20814438)

> The US doesn't manufacture those items because it's cheaper to have them shipped from China. Raise the cost of manufacturing them there and importing them, and the balance changes.

The US doesn't manufacture those items because it has no capability to do so.

There are no factories, no supply chain, no expertise and no known how.

There are some things that are cheaper to manufacture in US, (surprise!) if you manufacture for the local market, than in China, but them being simply cheaper still doesn't mean you can actually manufacture them.

I myself tried to setup an electric scooter factory, first in Canada, and than in Washington state. We were simply unable to find even moderately competent manufacturing engineers, nor the line workforce.

Of course, every consumable and every part had to be imported.

And both of the above meant that we decided to close the business in under 6 months.

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Re:No More Cheap Shipping for Chinese Sellers by SmartJerry on Tuesday August 27, 2019 @09:47PM (#20816154)

Even in industries the U.S. does have manufacturing for the cost of manufacturing is insane. I shopped around to literally every apparel production company listed on any list in the U.S. 50% of the companies said they don't have bandwidth to take any more orders, they literally didn't want the business at any price. The other 49% didn't deal in 'small orders' basically anything under 5000. In the last 1% of U.S. companies the very cheapest cost was double the price to manufacture in China - where we got very few quotes because of the language barrier.So Electric scooter or simple piece of clothing, the U.S. just loses out in every single way. This is the smallest of a long road to challenge China, point being if the U.S. companies are more comparable in price they will become more profitable, will be more likely to expand and build, and buyers will be more likely to buy U.S. Not to mention, the U.S. really needs it's own version of Alibaba so businesses can shop easier, it boggles my mind that it doesn't exist.

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Re:No More Cheap Shipping for Chinese Sellers by magduf on Friday August 30, 2019 @09:35AM (#20838424)

Check out the articles about the cost of small screws in America.

https://www.kut.org/post/one-reason-apples-computers-are-mos...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/28/technology/iphones-apple-...

Basically, the US simply does not have the infrastructure to manufacture complex items in mass quantities. We haven't invested in that infrastructure, whereas China has, so they have the ability to do this stuff, and we don't. So trying to build an iPhone in America is like trying to build an iPhone in Zimbabwe or Sudan or Armenia: the infrastructure simply doesn't exist and it isn't feasible to take on a project like that there.

America stopped being an industrial powerhouse decades ago, by choice, and you can't just bring that back overnight, especially when some other countries never gave that up and will easily out-compete you.

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