> 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.
None of the surveys are ever crafted to ask: "How much more would you pay for a $100 item for 'made in the USA'?".
When you’re using the same exact photos, there’s no discernible quality difference.
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).
Harder things: Food brands that support trump. JB Smucker. Whole Foods (owned by amazon). Apple (look at the recent #appletoo NLRB scandal.)
Really hard things (looking for an alternative): Amazon (not red state, but Bezos is pretty bad).
Also, any big-ticket discretionary purchases are getting delayed, bought from someone else or bought used.
Second, as a Canadian, I'm primarily concerned with the sovereignty of my country. Given both powers are expansionist, I'll take the one that isn't personally threatening me.
As mentioned in my previous comment, given a choice to deal with a non-expansionist, free democracy, I'd much quicker patronize them.
[1] Why are Chinese police operating in Canada, while our own government and security services apparently look the other way? - https://web.archive.org/web/20220926120429/https://www.thegl...
[2] Canada police probe alleged Chinese 'police stations' in Montreal - https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/canada-police-probe-a...
[3] CSIS documents reveal Chinese strategy to influence Canada’s 2021 election - https://web.archive.org/web/20230217155126/https://www.thegl...
[4] CSIS documents reveal a web of Chinese influence in Canada - https://web.archive.org/web/20230227134241/https://www.thegl...
[5] Canadian governments are locked in for a generation. If Canada finds the deal unsatisfactory, it cannot be cancelled completely for 31 years. China benefits much more than Canada, because of a clause allowing existing restrictions in each country to stay in place. Chinese companies get to play on a relatively level field in Canada, while maintaining wildly arbitrary practices and rules for Canadian companies in China. - https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/fipa-agreement-with-china-wha...
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada-China_Promotion_and_Rec...
I have a long history of fighting against equivocations of the US and China under previous administrations, but over the course of less than 100 days the US has declared literal economic war against all its allies and has made it clear that it is hostile to free democracies the world over.
Travel to the US, Tesla (which is very closely associated to Trump, via Musk) are already collapsing at an unprecedented speed. The only comparable period would be Covid lockdowns. The difference is that in 2020 this was expected to be somewhat temporary, even if the duration was unknown at the time, while this time is much more sentimental - it will take decades to unwind it. It's like trust - it takes a long time to build, but you can destroy it all in a second. And Trump did just that.
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?
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.
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.
These tariffs are somewhat about consent/mandate, nationalism, and economic policy and this story aims to be a data point, although I'm not really clear what the author wants people to conclude.
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.
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”
There's also a difference between "made in" and "assembled in" in other cases (but not sure that applies in this case?).
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.
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.
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
They didn’t bite.
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.
People buy cheap. They don't buy quality, they don't buy local, they don't buy green: they buy cheap.
Putting a ridiculous, almost 2x raise in such a way and pretending it's a gotcha is disingenuous.
Otherwise, if I do a shitty survey and you critique it mine is better than yours because "I did something"
Every PowerPoint think tank will beat you like that.
Next time engage with a little more honesty and you might have a chance
This article is also an example. You can disagree with their methodology, but I'll choose this article over posts with words like "more", "do", "don't" with no evidence attahched whatsoever.
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.
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.
> 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.
"Look for the union label" meant a lot to Americans back when there were unions.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.hudsonbaycapital.com/documents/FG/hudsonbay/rese...
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.
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.
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 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.
Maybe “Made in USA, China”
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Seems more likely they don't understand A/B.
"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!"
But if it’s around, yeah, I’ll eat tons of it.
“Revealed preference! Actually you wanted to eat a ton of junk food! You were lying to yourself!” No, I actually don’t want to, in fucking fact.
The generally accepted answer is that the only way to know for sure that people will buy something is to get them to pay you money or get them to commit to pay you money.
This falls broadly under the concept of the "lean startup" where you focus first on proving you can sell what you intend to build, and only build it after you have cash commitments from customers to buy what you intend to build.
The logic behind lean startup is that it's far more likely your startup will fail because no one will pay (or pay enough) for what you want to build than it is likely to fail because you can't actually build the thing you want to build. The later case is of course possible, but in practice far more startups fail because of lack of sales than from lack of technology.
Economists deal with this a lot, and being economists they create models or modify existing models to account for this gap. That certainly seems to work, to an extent, but only when applied to populations rather than individuals.
On a less academic note this is a major problem for science that relies on surveys, because even when anonymous people have an awareness that they're "speaking" to someone and being "judged" in some way. People, even in that moment alone with a survey, want to reinforce the image they have of themselves. When asked by a survey, "What do you want from a new newspaper?" Very few people respond, "Celebrities, scandals, and lewd pictures." People often skew to asking for thoughtful, long-form, in-depth reporting.
BUT... then they buy tabloids and click on bait, and they don't read the complex, nuanced, long-form stuff. If they aren't even consciously aware of that, short of getting them in a behavioral lab, how do you tease that out of them? Well structuring survey questions with redundant questions phrased differently can help, you can get a sense of someone's overall "sentiment" for example, but it's still limited for the reasons described above.
A few interesting examples from :
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/laibson/files/how_are_pref...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36434890/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...
Keywords to search for are "implicit" vs. "explicit" preferences