Only the ironically impaired will read about Walmart’s latest promotion without a smirk.
Walmart, we are told, is pushing “made in America” as its new theme.
the Bentonville, Ark.-based discounter pledged that it planned to buy $50 billion more U. S. made goods over the next decade. That’s the equivalent of just more than 10 percent of what Wal-Mart will sell at retail this year.
Let’s see, 10% of what Walmart will sell this year…but spread out over ten years. That means they are committed to sourcing all of 1% of their products from U.S.-made goods.
Wow! How generous of Walmart!
Their argument is that, if other retailers follow their lead and make a similar commitment, collectively, this will bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S.
Let’s see how realistic this argument is.
Take shoes, for instance; in 1960, the U.S made 98% of the shoes sold in this country. As of 2009, we were buying more than 90% of footwear from overseas.
I think we can safely assume that the small amount of U.S.-made footwear that is sold in America is mostly stocked by medium to higher priced stores. Walmart doesn’t contribute much if anything to the less than 10% of footwear currently being sourced, and is unlikely to make a change in that department.
Even if the next ten largest retailers of shoes in America made a commitment to match Walmart’s U.S. representation in the shoe department, that still would barely move the domestic consumption needle on shoes and would certainly not bring shoe manufacturing back to the U.S.
If their commitment is to sourcing 1% of their products from U.S. manufacturers, isn’t it fairly safe to say that they could satisfy this figure almost entirely with food products? In fact, I would venture to guess that Walmart is already satisfying the requirements of this very, very low bar.
So nothing ventured, nothing lost. Meanwhile Walmart gets some warm and fuzzies from the mathmatically challenged press and then has the opportunity to double-down on their rationale for buying “foreign” when, inevitably, it is more convenient to abandon the “made in USA” meme for “always low prices.”
Nothing really changes about the business model, just the marketing strategy.
Walmart broke it, and Walmart ain’t gonna fix it.
they had the same promotion probably 15-20 years ago, while a vermont store was just teh pie in the sky dream of Jeff… then after establishing the patriotic theme, they went to china….. what a plan… now it is recycled!!! Vermont loves recycling!!! Should go over pretty well.
But link trolling with a point: You can buy shoes, and all sorts of other things made in the U.S.
http://www.minorheresies.com/m…
Note especially the link farms – they have just about everything.
The aggravating thing is that an American made pair of jeans costs roughly the same as a sweatshop pair. It’s not a huge sacrifice to buy American. It’s just that more of the money goes to the people who make the stuff.
You can’t have ‘always low prices’ when American workers think they should be paid for their work.