Na na na na na wth?

It all starts with the consumer preferentially buying domestic made products, which I try to do where possible. Companies make money off of supplying what people want to buy. Saving a dime has made imports what people want to buy.
I have spent a lot of time in and around construction also. Highways, bridges and subdivisions mostly with things like grain silos, a refinery thrown in for good measure.
It used to be unheard of to see foreign made equipment on a job site. In the last 20 years or so itā€™s become swamped with imported equipment and much of that is from foreign owned companies.

I spent 43 years in the business of building locomotives. When I started there they used to brag they would bring in dirt on one end of the plant and finished locomotives would come out the other end. Well it wasnā€™t quite that but on one end of the plant was a foundry so they almost started with dirt. We made everything and had pretty much the full control of the supply chain if not in our plant then in other plants we owned. When the business went from being run from people that knew how to do things to financial people that only understood money. The evolution began to JIT and a hundred other names they called it. For us to not incur the cost of inventory we forced it on suppliers and they in turn charged us back for it. Then we would beat them down in price and then without inventory we would suffer shortages holding up hundreds of millions in sales.

We tore down the foundry and made a massive parking area that soon filled up with acres of tractor trailers of parts we didnā€™t own that were property of our supplies. We would order a single part the dream of JIT lot size of one. They would send us a notice the part was shipped and had arrived at our location and we would send a guy out to get just one.

We didnā€™t carry inventory and supply shortages went down.

It was a stupid shell game that the bean counters played. But most importantly it seemed to work.

On the other end as a young man starting out there we were shipping unfinished motor frames out at the end of the month and I asked the boss what we were doing. We would box them up put them on a truck and ship them out the gate bring them back unpack them and finish the work the next day. He told me oh itā€™s the end of the quarter and we have to meet our sales numbers. Insanity is what I told him and I was only 18 at the time. :upside_down_face:

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Bud, I have lived that story. To some degree in the Army and for 24 years building capacitors.
Now theyā€™re made primarily in China.

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