Everything Is“Made In China” Except Consumer Savings: What-the-What?
I do not own the license/copyright to the digital images/visuals below. They are not included for personal gain solely, but for an educational demonstration. Actually, this posting comes directly from composition class.
By now, the “Made In China” stamp is as American as apple pie, but where are the savings for consumers? And this is not a slight against China or Chinese people, so don’t come for me!
One of my favorite essays on earth is “Getting Coffee Is Hard to Do” by Stanley Fish. Published originally in the New York Times as an opinion piece in 2007, it has been excerpted, reprinted, and anthologized heavily. It is now a showpiece in many freshman composition books as a hallmark of process analysis rhetorical strategy.
In essence, Fish bemoans the intricate and lengthy process of getting today’s coffee. He mourns the simple, straight-forward pleasure of walking up to a formica counter, exchanging salutations with a waitress, passing her a dime, receiving a piping hot cup of coffee in a real cup, and perhaps a retrieving a copy of today’s paper. Gen Z students do not understand why Fish is mourning, because many of them have never even seen a diner. Many of them have never watched the Back to the Future trilogy and seen Marty encounter Biff at the diner while the future mayor chats it up with his dad (This is causing me to rethink what I would normally take for granted as universal American pop culture references, but that is another posting).
I have to show one in class. To be sure, I show them that Americans are not the only people who cherish the experience of drinking from a real cup and reading an actual newspaper. Other cultures do, too. Imagine that, one of my students said under her breath. There are people who don’t use grubhub for food. I digress.
Once students are shown a real picture of a real diner with very garish stools and interminable countertops, a very real debate develops centered around Fish’s thesis.
When companies want to justify outsourcing jobs and leaving hundreds, sometimes thousands, of Americans unemployed, they usually give us two narratives in the news: (1) American facilities are old and would cost too much money to update, and (2) this move is going to cut costs nearly in half.
First of all, if a private company has owned a particular facility since World War II, wouldn’t it occur to management to update it at some time? I have not been a homeowner for long, but there are some changes that I must make right now. For far too long, the business model in America has been to cut spending and investing in the company and reduce expenses in order to make the company super-profitable. What is a company’s biggest “expense”? Pay roll. While the world needs accountants, it does not need the kind of mentality that declares human beings are no more than expenditures that need to be cut, and American jobs/infrastructure are just not worth it. A second, tributary excuse that these companies use is the lack of education. If American higher educational facilities are just that awful, why do international students keep coming? Not only do they come, they take photos of professors’ slides, get copies of their syllabuses, order two sets of textbooks, and send some of them home. Further, if workers are going to be laid off while the companies become profitable, why don’t the unemployed American workers, the ones who made the company profitable in the first place, receive some kind of stipend as long as the company is open? Why doesn’t the worker share in these profits? Why do the companies leave it to the federal government to process unemployment claims and the workers to find a new job? Isn’t that, well, corporate hustling (to put it nicely)?
Here’s the second point of Fish’s debate, for all of the automation (further loss of human jobs), use of technology, and outsourcing in the name of saving, why are consumers NOT SEEING THE SAVINGS? By now, the “Made In China” stamp is ubiquitous in our household. Just last summer, one of my neighbors purchased an American flag, and it said, “Made In China!” We laughed and laughed. I then went on a quest to find a sign in my house that reads, “Made in the USA.” These things were everywhere during my childhood, so I thought at least something would have it. And something did have it: my hair products! Also, my coffee and coffee creamer, bread, and some beverages were all made in America. Then I noticed a pattern: only perishable goods or those which come from a service, such as my hair products, are made in America. Durable goods, whether they are actually durable or produced with built-in obsolescence (to put it nicely), are made elsewhere. Hmmmm.
On a more serious note, General Motors just closed another plant and is moving it overseas. I was small child when they destroyed a whole town to build that plant. I very, VERY vaguely remember people crying on the news. But as a child, I did not know what was happening. Now, that factory, for which a whole town was destroyed, is being closed up and workers are being laid off. To save money. But have you seen the price of a Suburban lately? Moving things overseas for company savings hadn’t led to consumer savings. If companies are saving money as they claim, who is seeing the savings? “Not I,” says this fat brown lady from Mississippi. And I live in the Deep South where the cost of living is relatively cheap! It seems that everything except real estate is being outsourced to save somebody some money somewhere.
It used to be said that what was good for General Motors is good for America. Yeah, right. Tell that to my struggling bank account.
As always, if you like this article, clap back (Don’t diss me. Literally, press the little hands at the bottom or left side of the screen). Or, you could always enroll in one of my classes. This conversation was lifted from Composition I.
