Buy American

I subscribe to several online newsletters and groups and receive weekly publications or daily digests from most of them. Last week I was reading through one of them and came upon an article about buying American made products. The author was lamenting the current state of our economy and placing a significant amount of blame for it upon the fact that we are all buying Chinese products down at Walmart. Now I am pretty sure that we have much greater problems in this country than Chinese products from Walmart, but the guy made an impassioned argument. In his article, he mentioned a company that made shoes and was located in the USA. He went on about how the man who ran the company would only sell American made products even though he could make more money if he moved his manufacturing off shore. He also mentioned about the quality and style of the company's products.

Well I could use a good pair of shoes so I decided to click on the link in the article and see what I could find. Initially I was disappointed in what I saw. The shoes on the main page of the website were what I would describe as butt ugly. Actually I see shoes like that all the time so I suspect that many folks like them but they don't appeal to me. If you saw them, you would know what I am talking about. I am sure there is a name for them but I don't know it. Anyway, style aside, the next problem was sticker shock. They were priced between $300 and $600 a pair. I had expected to pay more for something made in the USA, but not quite that much more. I decided to search the website and see what I could come up with. After a few minutes, I came upon a nice looking shoe that I would describe as a boat shoe. It was made of distressed leather and just looked comfortable, kind of like an old pair of leather work gloves or a WWII bomber jacket. The price was not bad either. They were $125 a pair. I was contemplating clicking on the "add to cart" button when I saw it. Down near the bottom of the page was a statement, "Made in the Dominican Republic." Poof! The magic disappeared. I closed the page. Don't get me wrong. I've got nothing against the Dominican Republic or Haiti or even Cuba for that matter and technically I realize that they are just as American as we are, but somehow when I read the guy's article I was thinking about helping some folks in Youngstown OH or Provo UT or somewhere like that. I realize that he never said made in the USA but unfortunately I fell in to that trap that we citizens of the USA set for ourselves. We call ourselves Americans when actually anyone living in North or South American are Americans. If folks from Canada are Canadians and folks from Mexico are Mexicans then I suppose that folks from the United States are actually United Statians. Pretty easy to see why we call ourselves Americans. I suppose we could be called staters or we could call ourselves what I suspect most of the other people of the world call us but SOBs is not quite geographically specific enough. But I digress.

The point is that very little that is attractive and affordable is made in the USA at this time. Now you can take that as a personal affront and spend all your time running around looking for "Made in the USA" stickers or you can go ahead and do the best you can with what you can find. Life is a lot like a game of cards. You have to play with the cards that you are dealt. We may not be happy with the way things are, but hang on, they will change, and who knows we may someday look back on today as being back in the good ole days.