David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…At some point, the majority of items sold in Walmart were made in China. I think during the '80s, it went from 6–40%. If you take out grocery, I'm sure most stuff in Walmart is not made in America. When Walmart recognized that this was a problem and tried to address it, but if you're a supplier and there are a bunch of examples in the book of lawnmower companies, Vlasic that makes pickles, at a certain point, you cannot pay American labor the wages that you need to pay them and price products where Walmart needs them priced. It just does not work. You have to offshore it. That's one issue. You could argue about whether that's good or bad. But certainly now, post COVID here in 2022, all sorts of reasons why we see there's a negative side of the ledger of offshoring American manufacturing. That's one. Two is the quality of products, which is also related. The other thing is that whether you're making stuff in America or elsewhere, if you keep pushing down those margins so far, you've got to use lower quality materials in your product. There's just this constant barrage to push down quality, push down labor cost, and all that comes at a real cost. And quality was an afterthought. Even in '92 when Sam published his book, it was only in the last decade where they were realizing how important quality was in addition to price.…

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