There are fewer and fewer of those all the time, though. Manufacturing is now starting to move to Africa because Asia has become more expensive. I don't think there's anywhere left to go after Africa.
If I can get an ePacket from AliExpress for a $0.50 item without paying shipping (and presumably where the shipper didn’t eat it either, the cost not being worth it to make at most $0.50), presumably there’s a way around both of these things.
Also, don’t forget that there are major markets besides North America. And there are plenty of such markets that can be served overland or with not-so-powerful ships from developing-country suppliers. Africa can sell to itself, and to Europe, and the Middle East. Many South American nations can sell into Brazil. Obviously, you can drive a truck of t-shirts from Thailand or Vietnam straight to China. The Philippines can ship pretty cheaply to Japan and Taiwan. Etc.
I remember there was drama[1][2] around it during Trump's administration.
It might not be so ridiculously cheap once 2025 comes around and they've finished phasing in price increases.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/10/trump...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Postal_Union#2019_Ex...
Anyways, long story to say that anecdotally prices haven’t really gone up at all. At one point they started charging VAT on orders (21%), but the switch to private delivery hasn’t seemed to increase prices.
He said that the Garment District is "never coming back." I suspect that this could be extrapolated to many other industries, for the same reason.
The issue is that the infrastructure is gone. Not just the physical and logical infrastructure, but the social infrastructure[0], as well.
Social infrastructure is ignored by everyone, but I think that it's the most important type of infrastructure, and the most difficult to [re]build.
I think you can find a few who still do such things in maker spaces, as well, but it only seems to be taken up by people who are already gainfully employed in things that make a lot more than low end manufacturing work.
Rip my favorite shirt? Leave it on the counter with a note and my wife will have it fixed by the end of the day ... Love my wife.
Maybe you mean people who do or used to do it professionally?
How many people do you know that could turn raw fabric into a dress? I have can do the simplest repairs and even used a sewing machine a few times but that’s not particularly useful to a garment factory.
Sewing/dressmaking is a lot like woodworking. Being able to visualize things well in 3D is an asset, but also having good tools helps as well.
It's fairly obvious that people think that these folks can be replaced by software, but they say the same thing about engineers.
Also, entire communities were built around textile mills and transportation/consolidation/intermodals. When we shut down the Garment District, and shipped all the work overseas (and my friend freely admits his company did the same), it destroyed these communities. Lot of skilled labor left, and stopped training the next generation.
And, to answer another question, I don't have to "prove" anything. I was simply telling something that I heard from an extremely relevant source. I'm sure as hell not going to ask my friend to "prove what he said," for the convenience of Internet randos.
Basically, it's the social structure that is built around a community's Raison D'etre, or reason for existence.
This is schools, housing, curriculum (there's a reason that RIT is based in Rochester, for example), as well as oral and learned tradition.
"Tribal knowledge" is a dirty word to efficiency nerds, but that doesn't change the fact that it exists, and is highly effective, for a reason.
There are entire districts, known for the finest $WHATEVER. Lübeck, Germany, is known for marzipan (I don't really like it, but lots of others do). Bordeaux is known for wines and cooking, Afghanistan has some of the best opium, etc. Some of these are due to climate and soil, but others can be lost to other areas (Sonoma, for instance).
They may have great soil, but they also have great farmers, who have been handing their skills down, for generations, etc.
Once that is gone, there ain't no making new ones.
You haven't made a single compelling argument as to why we cannot also rebuild social infrastructure.
Much of this social capital requires lots of folks being interested in something since they were young and "playing" at it. Play is an important way to learn and understand it. Also I believe social capital requires adults to respect and take interest in the item, as children often take their cues from that.
That said, I wonder if industrial clothing manufacturing requires that much social infrastructure? That industry seems to move very couple of decades to a new country with the cheapest labor.
...and I don't have to.
Have a nice Easter/Passover!
For our own sanity we have to believe we have at least some handle on the reality unfolding around us - but even a cursory examination shows this cannot be true. Our lives are so brief, so localised, when set against the totality of all that is, was, and will be. Instead, as we shape the world, the world shapes us, and it is this emergent collective consciousness that conspires to give us all that we have.
How easily do you think a new team of the same size could come in and restart operations? Most likely it would take a long time and a lot of capital before that company was productive again.
That's what the parent means by social infrastructure: institutional knowledge--all the stuff that isn't written down anywhere.
The NASA-industrial complex that built the Saturn V rocket is largely gone: The engineers, factory workers, etc., who had the necessary knowledge — much of it tacit — are retired or dead.
But even if you fixed that the sub component infrastructure isn’t there. The raw fabrics are simply not available here so even if you did pay labor of 160/$ a day you would still not be able to get raw materials
Same with New Balance. Their shoes compete with Nike made in Asia, and are MIUSA.
We've just become addicted to cheap crap shoveled into Walmart and Amazon.
You fail to show what exactly in a social infrastructure inhibits clothing manufacturing or other industries.
One example that may come to mind is a possible cultural refusal of jobs offering low wages - yet there exist societies in which it is difficult to find personnel for menial jobs and yet clothing manufacturing still thrives.
Define “strategic.”
If you mean a vital military asset, remember that clothing factories were an important industry during the wars (including the Revolutionary and Civil wars, in the US).
Military uniforms are critical. Ask any soldier. Just a couple of days ago, a friend that is an ex-marine, was telling me about the marvelous gear he had for winter exercises in Lake Tahoe. Watch any show about the siege at Stalingrad, to see what improper uniforms can mean.
If you mean a vital financial asset, then think about the economic vitality that is created by any industry. All the factories, brokers, marketers, transporters, etc. Lots of busy little ants. The garment industry is huge. My friend is extremely wealthy from a fairly small, undistinguished corner of it.
If we think of “fashion,” as a flighty, will o’ the wisp “hobby,” then consider the amazing amount of money sloshing around the world, from it. I’m not a fashionista, and the company that my friend owns isn’t really a high-fashion outfit. They do high-quality “every[wo]man” clothes, for reasonable costs. If you spent an hour, talking to him about the logistics of his operation, your jaw would hit the floor.
Many folks would argue that alcoholic beverages are an unnecessary, and possibly immoral, product, but, once again, we have an enormous industry around it. I have a couple of other friends and acquaintances that are fairly wealthy, from selling booze. Prohibition taught us a pretty big lesson.
Many folks would say that advertising, mobile games, and “vanity apps” are “not strategic,” but I’ll bet there’s a ton of folks here, that would take issue with that statement.
I sometimes wonder whether that’s long-term truly the case. When I see various advanced aramid weaving processes and techniques designed and built in the US, I wonder if they had to scale a dizzying skills and operational mountain by themselves with the lack of a US domestic textile industry, or whether there isn’t much of a cross-fertilization in the entire journey from R&D through scale-out mass manufacturing.
I’m personally inclined to believe an innovation-oriented, Burkes’ian Connections-style society is only feasible when the Brownian motion of ideas occurs within a dense fabric of interplaying, fractally-complex industrial relationships between a massive number of different industries.
Turns out textiles is sort of the cheapest industry. It’s unique in that it requires capital in the form of machines, but doesn’t require a high skill labor force and the machines tend to be highly portable. So it ends up being an industry to follow if you want to know where the cheapest labor is. Basically what happens with textiles, is that every so often the standard of living in a country goes up, and the factory owners look around to try to save on labor, and hope to find a cheaper place to move to. What’s sort of interesting is that there aren’t many places left that have enough political stability that owners are willing to risk moving equipment to that are cheaper than bangledesh. This was like 10 years ago though, I’d be curious where textiles are located now.
The Bangladeshi textile industry will continues to remain for the foreseeable future, but textile manufacturing has started to return to India now that unskilled manufacturing wages are starting to reach the $150-200/month mark globally. When Bangladeshi and Indian unskilled labor starts going for $300-400/montn it will move to Nepal and then Eastern Africa (or Pakistan+Myanmar if their politics stabilizes).
Read “How Asia Works” for how things actually work in industrialising a country and its stages.
Countries actively choose to seek to develop an industrial base and they start with textiles. Then they evolve their industrial base to a higher income industry, and they let go of textiles over time.
That’s how it happens in an organised industrial development plan. In disorganised industrialisation, you have everything going on at once and you get Brazil.
There are so many layers to this. At $15 per hour minimum wage the math simply does not add-up. People are not willing to pay enough for clothing to be able to support mass US or European manufacturing. That cork was put on that bottle a long time ago. This, BTW, is the case for lots of other sectors, not just clothing.
“ Grupp [ the owner] is publicly committed to Germany as a production location and advertises that all raw materials for the clothing are purchased in EU countries, that all production takes place in Germany, that there has been no short-time work or layoffs for over 30 years, and that Trigema guarantees employees' children a job or apprenticeship.”
Quality is pretty good.
At a certain point of automation, America’s energy-cost and proximity advantages outweigh its cost of labor and regulation. This tradeoff as a whole occurs against margin, which is why we’re seeing middle manufacturing reshoring.
Shipping things via train or boat is stupidly stupidly cheap, even across the planet both ways.
Totally agree on shipping. There are other benefits to proximity, from lower geopolitical and supply-chain risk to tighter integration with design and the customer (due to enhanced information flow and lower latency).
Unfortunately, human hands are still much cheaper than machines.
I see a fair bit of manufacturing in Chicago, and I don’t see any of these equations changing in the way that this article purports them to
There's a reason why low-end manufacturing is not heavily automated no matter where it occurs - automation would likely be more expensive than using humans.
Also importantly automation tends to be expensive to reconfigure - for stable product lines where the same general processes are in use for years at a time, and product variability is low (see: cars) automation is highly successful. But for product lines that are more fly-by-night (see: most fast fashion) the reconfiguration cost of automation makes it even less practical.
Retraining a group of humans is vastly cheaper and easier than reconfiguring a fully integrated automated assembly line.
Totally agree. Just pointing out how the trade-off is rebalancing the margin at which reshoring makes sense down, and that this is a trend one can expect to continue as industrial robots get better and cheaper.
The real limitation is still programming and training the robots. I'm just entering this field, and its fun but yah it takes a team of expensive talented engineers to do it. Especially if you're automating to a higher degree. The progress with AI has been huge but I'd guess on the order of a decade before its commonplace.
Drive and cam shafts, bearing sleeves, rebuilds and reworks are all still unmatched in quality and remain largely american. Waiting 4 months for pajeet or Mr wong to float the parts over from a scrapyard masquerading as a machine shop versus sending a skilled onsite mechanical maintenance tech to rebuild an excavator blade or bucket sleeve is a no brainer.
Petroleum and mining industries have zero tolerance for a service or product without a stateside relationship
Terrible scripting and faked moments, but still interesting for the good and the bad.
The USD couldnt function as a reserve currency (from the perspective of the US) if the US didnt run a massive trade deficit on purpose (import way more than you export). That's very hard to do if your manufacturing isn't happening outside of the US in countries that you want to be dependent on the USD.
The day manufacturing actually makes a significant comeback to the US is the day that the US lost it's status as the nr 1 world power: the day the USD will stop being a world reserve currency. It would be extremely bad news for the US geo-politically and economically.
And low end is hardly coming back. This has be said many times in the past during brief alignments, then by the time we’ve tooled up the rug is pulled out from under us and a new 3rd world nation is doing it for 1/10th the cost.
This is not easy for me to believe even with the desire for a rosy outlook. Those who know know this was bs before.