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It is insanely hard to build basic things in the US anymore, even if there is a market, even if the market will pay your prices, even if you have the capital to start, and even if you can hire reliable workers. And those are all HUGE ifs.

The biggest problem is that the base underlying our manufacturing capability has almost completely evaporated. You need tool and die companies to build parts for your manufacturing machines, but almost none are left. There are only a few plastic injection manufacturing companies left, and they are either fully booked or on the path to shutting down. (No, you can't 3D print products for the mass market, it's way too slow and expensive.) Young people think of trades and manufacturing jobs as fall-backs that only drop-outs who couldn't hack college get into. You will make many times more money as a salescritter convincing people to buy things they don't need than using decades of engineering experience to build the things they do.

It's a popular misconception that China's manufacturing advantage is cheaper labor. This was _maybe_ true for a while, their advantage right now is that they have all the things mentioned above: they have the tool and die shops, they have the supply chains, and they have workforce. They can go from product idea to shipping in a week. I do not celebrate the Chinese government for much, but making sure they had a robust manufacturing base from top to bottom was the biggest and most important thing they have ever done. The US government let ours wither and die. Which has made our economy remarkably fragile and essentially decimated the whole idea of a blue-collar middle class.

Destin from Smarter Every Day encountered all of this when he tried to make a better grill brush using only a handful of parts and _still_ did not manage to make the whole thing using only US-originated parts. It's a fascinating window into how hard it is to make anything at all here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTGwcHQfLY

> You need tool and die companies to build parts for your manufacturing machines, but almost none are left. There are only a few plastic injection manufacturing companies left, and they are either fully booked or on the path to shutting down.

> Young people think of trades and manufacturing jobs as fall-backs that only drop-outs who couldn't hack college get into.

As an engineer running a factory in New Jersey doing, among other things, injection molding, this is way off base. There are plenty of tool and die shops. While they do exist, injection molding job shops are a miniscule fraction of the injection molding market. The machines are so cheap and so easy to use that everyone in-houses their molding operations.

I don't personally see a shortage of young people in manufacturing; I'm in my mid 30s and I'm the old man in my department, and my past employers and the various companies I interact with seem to have similar demographic structures. Our job postings are flooded with kids fresh out of school applying for jobs. My job requires a degree; and it is quite rare to find someone who does not hold a degree compared to say software development. A lot of manufacturing companies will pay to send mid-career employees to school. Post secondary degrees are not uncommon.

> Destin from Smarter Every Day encountered all of this when he tried to make a better grill brush using only a handful of parts and _still_ did not manage to make the whole thing using only US-originated parts. It's a fascinating window into how hard it is to make anything at all here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTGwcHQfLY

This video is a very poor representation of american manufacturing, likely due to Destin not having any prior experience in that space, and for entertainment value. The process could have been much easier if he talked with a manufacturing engineer early on. Further, he seems to not recognize the concept of comparative advantage. The truth is that international supply lines are actually incredibly beneficial for domestic manufacturing.

What do you consider cheap? Last time I looked, injection molding machines were decidedly not cheap. Furthermore, the cost of a set of molds can run into the range of 6 to 7 figures.

> There are only a few plastic injection manufacturing companies left, and they are either fully booked or on the path to shutting down.

How does this work? How can a market have half its supply be fully booked and the other half not have enough work?

Shops can shut down for more reasons than not having enough work, such as tariffs and regulations affecting CoGS, low hiring capability, CoGS changing (like energy), and especially tool and material shortages (also affected by the same issues). I remember one of my bosses closing his shop due to these issues, as well as the compounding factors of corporate buyouts of smaller outfits and job offshoring, too. America is an expensive place, and market makers do not like expensive places.

That makes sense, thanks.

If anyone is interested, I know someone in San Francisco who built a full injection molding shop in their basement and is happy to take orders.

Also I know a 3d printer that can print molds for injection molding, and I know a guy with a set of printers who'd be happy to take orders.

Because the other half are being undercut by china.

So am I going crazy or... Are tarrifs the answer here? It sure sounds like something needs to happen, are there better alternatives?

Tariffs 30 years ago possibly could have stopped the manufacturing base from being destroyed, but they're not sufficient to rebuild it. Taxing imports sufficiently that building locally is cheaper will keep your local companies in business, but it's still a very unappealing investment. There's no guarantee that the tariffs will stay in place long enough for you to make money, and even without foreign competition your prices are still limited by demand elasticity. Outright subsidies can work better as they effectively let you raise your price above what people are willing to pay, but there's still plenty of long-term problems.

Subsidies, lot of subsidies. And probably a lot of monitoring and adjusting by lawmakers to ensure that industries continues to improve their capabilities.

There's more to that but rebuilding our industrial capacity is a work of a generation.

Tariffs could help if they were strategically applied, but that's not happening.

You’re not wrong, but how should politics fix this? It’s easy to buy the machines and the software and the training for a tool die shop. But the actual production is still messy and dangerous and needs lots of electricity. And while the salary is not horrible, it’s also not good, because no matter what you do you compete on price with shops in Shenzhen. That means what you actually need to get this manufacturing back to the US is cheaper cost of living. Your US employees need to be able to afford a middle class lifestyle in the US while matching CN salary levels. If that doesn’t work, prospective employees will choose other jobs.

Cost of energy can definitely be affected by government projects and regulations.

Automation? Though china are not half bad themselves.

Or bet on china crashing their housing bubble and take their currency stability and industry with them. But we've been predicting that for well over 10 years and it hasn't happened yet.

... and it would be quite useful to have local industry to replace it with, or we just end up crashing the USD aswell when nobody can produce anything.

>compete on price with shops in Shenzhen

One way to help with this fight is to charge a tax on things made in Shenzhen. This helps by funding the government, helping build roads and fund things like healthcare, and also makes those items more price competitive with American-made goods.

People are downvoting you. But that is not entirely fair.

Tarrifs can work. They're an excellent tool when applied stratecally, gradually, and combined with focused effort to nurture local alternatives.

Just because we're currently seeing them used in the most crude and reckless way possible does not diminish their value.

Your feeling of obligation to add a disclaimer is why others felt the need to downvote that comment you replied to. Be the fairness you claim to want.

I only need a disclaimer because the very concept of tarrifs has become politically charged. The original comment makes a good argument without any value statement about current politics or recent events.

The comment should normally not have needed the context i added; to be taken seriously.

Letting things die is why the US is thriving. Central planning never works in the long term. It is cruel, risky and unfair, but adapting and evolving is the only way for a system to endure the environment changes.

I'm really not sure the US is thriving. A few ultra rich may be winning the numbers games for the country (gdp, Dow Jones, F500, etc)...but debt, education, isolation, etc, makes me think you're not winning.

I find it difficult to reconcile “this is what makes the country work long term” when the country you’re talking about is one of the youngest on the world stage.

I should also point out that part of why the US is as strong a global presence is because the manufacturing infrastructure of Europe was decimated after some pretty intense warfare.

I just don’t see what you’re asserting.

That video from smarter every day was an eye opener. The effort to just make the simple mold was frightening. The chase to find a single source for a standard screw disheartening.

I've talked with some friends here in europe after seeing that video, and apparently tool and die remains more avaliable here. (Metal casting is impossible nationally though)

I suspect the larger travel distance to China from europe create a market nieche that keep it alive when quick iteration is important. I dont think we succeeded better politically basides that luck. (Trades is frowned opon in the same way)

Locally we have a good prototype industry for cirquitboard design (we work with them regularly), but very few large scale producers. The companies that make electronics nationally often have their own cirquitboard factories for their usecase.

But that doesn't work for new companies trying to create new products. The most common approach is to send the design to China and get a pallet of cirquitboards back fully assembled. (With frankly excellent expert support for any issues discovered in manufacturing)

I strongly believe that video exaggerates for effect. You can buy a CNC mill capable of cutting molds on Amazon. And you can rent Fusion 360 for a few dollars per day. And a low volume injection molding robot costs ~ $10k

That means any middle sized company could have this in-house if they wanted to.

You are severely underestimating the expertise and complexity in tool and die making. Cutting the metal is the simple part. The core difficulty wasn't producing the part nor mold; it was finding a guy who knew how.

At a comparable price to what you could get in China?

Nevermind that even if you clear all those hurdles and get your product to market, China will copy it, likely improve it, and start selling it on Amazon for half your materials cost. Patents be damned.

As a side note, your comment makes me think of the software world where we have amazing talent and things looks like it’s sliding to being done in the majority with AI. Once that’s the case and we don’t have developers anymore then we’re out of knowledge and at the mercy of. Not being able to build complex systems in autonomy. A bit like what happened in the industry you describe

> You will make many times more money as a salescritter convincing people to buy things they don't need than using decades of engineering experience to build the things they do.

That's the fundamental problem. The pay for industrial roles is garbage compared to the skill required. Anyone talented enough to do those roles can obviously see that and opts to do something else.

How did we get here?

Globalization, financialization, prioritizing short term profits over long term systems. GE, Boeing, etc.

Maybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect?

1) Software can be remote

Consequently, industrial employers don't have a local monopoly on jobs like they used to. Any industrial employer is competing against any remote position willing to pay above them. That generally isn't hard given how little the industrial employer is willing to pay.

2) Industrial locations generally suck and you have to be there in person

Manufacturing generally needs space, and real estate prices are ridiculous. Consequently, manufacturing tends to be located in undesirable areas. That means long commutes or locating in sub-tier cities.

3) No penalty for outsourcing to foreign countries.

This is what tariffs are supposed to be for. You slowly ratchet up tariffs until you get the result you need.

The problem is that tariffs get politically captured by the oligarchs who use them to completely protect their stupidity (see: the big automakers in the US in the 1970s) until they get totally obliterated.

MBAs

To anyone who thinks “we moved manufacturing to China, so someone should be able to replicate that playbook“, the Chinese government is one step ahead. They know that being the world’s sole manufacturing base is an incredible economic and geopolitical advantage and won’t give that up. Allowing any country to do a China on them will only weaken their economies of scale.

And how do they do this? Requiring export licenses for manufacturing machines. Apple wanted to diversify their iPhone manufacturing to India. The machines needed to manufacture iPhones and themselves made only in China. And China placed export restrictions on them to slow down or stop that process. Ditto on the expertise to run those plants. That expertise used to be distributed. It’s mostly Chinese now, and the government exerts a more direct influence on the experts to prevent the knowledge from being spread around.

In any case the idea of being able to trust a foreign country as place where stuff can be manufactured has been harmed by both China and Trump. China has demonstrated how such leverage can be abused and Trump has broken the taboo against tariffs. So there’s going to be even less support for creating an alternative to China, which ironically strengthens China.

Lastly, even if you got the machines and the know-how and set up a plant in another country, you’re still buying most of your components and raw materials from China. And China has gotten incredibly good at sanctioning specific industries in specific countries. Ask American arms manufacturers that need permanent magnets.

Didn’t Britain do this too for looms?

Yes, for example, it's shocking how much harder it became for a random market entrant to get into the business of making auto parts since the 2008 shutdown, which consolidated and shuttered much of the supply chain. It's industrial capacity that will take decades to "grow" back, if ever.

Huge market opportunity.

> Newcomb joined the company 20 years ago as a packer of chair mats, which the facility made at the time. He took on new roles as years went by. When he reached a point where he wanted a leadership position, Newell’s human-resources department said the company would give him the job, but he would need an undergraduate degree, the cost of which the company would cover.

> Mike Newcomb now leads the molding department. Newcomb obtained a business degree from a local college and now leads the molding department, overseeing production of the 4.3 billion pen barrels and caps the facility makes each year.

My question is always, why? Why was the degree required for this? He has 20 years of experience. Send him to a 4 week management training course or something. I went to business school for undergrad and it prepared me very little to run a molding department. I think this guys experience was already his biggest asset and this investment could have been significantly less expensive.

In my experience, people who are self-taught or who learned by experience tend to have odd gaps in their knowledge.

For example, the Shazam app. I knew right away it must be using Fourier analysis. But if one was self-taught, one might have never understood what the point of FA was, or even have been aware of its existence, and instead used kludgy, inept methods.

For a personal example, I was once given the job of taking the graphic display on a CRT and mapping it onto a printer page. The addressing was different, the axes were different, the pixels/per inch were different. I knew what the tool was - a transformation matrix. Had it ginned up in an hour and it worked first try.

A co-worker was completely baffled at this. He didn't know what a transformation matrix was, and likely would have otherwise spent a couple weeks on the problem and done a crappy job.

I.e. one doesn't know what one doesn't know. The advantage of an accredited degree program is the curriculum is selected by people who know what you need to know, and the order in which information is best presented.

I have this issue myself. I was trained as a mechanical engineer, not a computer scientist, not a programmer. I'm pretty much self-taught as a programmer. I run into peculiar gaps in my knowledge that a formally educated computer scientist would consider basic knowledge.

One of the reasons Andrei Alexandrescu and I worked well together as a team designing D is that he had the formal training, and I had the practical experience. Our abilities complemented each other's.

P.S. I once invented a concept, and proudly did a presentation on it. It was rudely brought to my attention that this was well known in computer science. Very, very embarrassing.

Which is funny because everyone and their mother in software development is eager to show off something that has existed since the '70s.

The phenomenon is so common in tech--something I, too, have experienced despite computer science having been my major--that it should practically just be a right of passage for software engineers.

What was the concept?

Sorry, it was too humiliating for me to bring up again :-/ It pains me to even think about it.

This makes sense working backwards: self-taught individuals are motivated to learn what they need to know from the problems they face, and degree-earners are taught a curriculum that a bunch of different people agree covers, broadly, a cross-section of everything that matters in their field.

> self-taught individuals are motivated to learn what they need to know from the problems they face

The problem is not knowing what one needs to know.

I'd still argue that the time to make a focused curriculum to close those gaps (even if it's just a pamphlet of topics to research) is much less time and money than the prospect of paying for more schooling. I'll definitely take the latter if the company is paying for it, but it just seems to be another one of those micro-inefficiencies in US Labor.

> less time and money

Caltech has a large course catalog. I could only take a certain number at a time. Other than what was required for the degree, I carefully selected courses I anticipated would have the largest payoff in my desired career. The usual course was 3-0-6, meaning 3 hours of lecture a week, 0 hours lab, 6 hours study.

I don't regard any of it as wasted time and money. Except the economics class.

Here's my class load for one semester in my junior year:

AMA95 Intro Methods Applied Math 12

AM97 Analy Mech Deform Bodies 9

ME5 Design 9

ME19 Fluid Mech & Gas Dynamics 9

CS114 Micro Process Systems 9

BEM106 Business Econ Sem 9

That comes to an estimated 57 hours/week of work. For me, those estimates were pretty accurate. If you want to point out the waste of time and money, have at it!

Universities aren't set up to efficiently teach people that already know much of the material. If someone has a decade of experience, its likely faster and cheaper to hire some associate professor to identify the gaps and teach it directly.

But, people rarely care about actual knowledge, and want that degree checkbox checked.

But does that apply to business management?

I do not have formal training in business management. But I'm pretty sure that formally learning it is not useless knowledge, if one intends to manage a business.

For one example, learning accounting. A lot of people try to run a business without understanding how double-entry bookkeeping works. This gets them into trouble with the IRS, for one result, and with bankers, for another.

During summer vacation, at loose ends, I signed up at the local college for a course in double-entry bookkeeping. It's paid off for me ever since.

My personal opinion is that BM is a weird world and I don't know how it can be standardized and taught in a formal setting.

It is domain specific and sometimes even company specific. How such a thing can be standardised and formally taught is the question I'm interested in.

I'm not the right person to ask that of. Maybe an MBA from Harvard.

> In my experience, people who are self-taught or who learned by experience tend to have odd gaps in their knowledge.

On the other hand, people who learn from experts learn, in addition to the experts' wisdom, also the experts' biases and blind spots. Or, to say it differently, being taught by experts is a good way to learn how to do what the experts already know how to do, but not how to do what they don't. (And I say this without casting any shade on the idea of education by the experts—I am a professor by trade.)

That's why one needs both academics and experience. It's not either-or.

Yes, this. Study (in my case computer engineering) but work in co-op (multiple 4-month internships). Graduated ready to be hired by several employers.

As someone who never went to college: one thing I know I’m missing is knowing patterns and the commensurate pattern matching. What you describe perfectly illustrates this. Knowing what are effectively standard tools, best approaches to known challenges, and what’s truly novel is something almost no one without a formal education can do. You’ll hear protests to the contrary but it’s just a fact.

One common problem I’ve seen with people with a lot of formal education (conversely) is difficulty handling situations outside of the norm or that are truly novel.

I call those people "formula-pluggers". If they cannot find a formula, they are dead in the water. That wasn't the kind of education I received.

I am torn on this. I have friends who complain that they are engineers, and had to take so much math in school they don’t use. They apparently dont see much value in just the fact they learned it, or the increased knowledge. However, no matter how much experience someone may have, I am not sure I am willing to trust a bridge designed by an engineer that couldnt pass a basic calculus sequence. To steelman this position, the college degree is a singal that they are capable of learning some more complex concepts. So even if it isnt a business degree, if they start talking about cost basis they can pick that up, and that they can read and write at a high enough level to function in management. It also shows that the person is serious about moving up.

I don't use, and barely passed that circuits course using partial differential equations. But at least now I have some idea of what they are, and where they are useful.

I also don't use Fourier transforms much, or Taylor or McLaurin expansions - but it gives me a solid foundation for understanding how people do various signal analysis, function approximation, etc.

I.e. I agree that I had to take a lot of math. And I don't use much of it. But I'm not really resentful of it - I'm only resentful of the sometimes useless profs we got.

I have friends who complain that they are engineers, and had to take so much math in school they don’t use.

Every liberal arts major could make this complaint. The curriculum is supposed to teach you to think, not necessarily to teach you things.

> I have friends who complain that they are engineers, and had to take so much math in school they don’t use.

This seems to me like saying "I could be a better engineer by combining engineering expertise with mathematical knowledge, and I have that knowledge, but I prefer not to use it." I don't always learn new things well enough to realize their potential, but I've never once regretted learning something new, and, if I don't know how to use it, then I usually assume that's on me, not on the subject.

I wouldn't be surprised if the degree is one of those hard requirements they just have for such positions.

That said, as someone who doesn't have a business degree, shouldn't it ideally prepare him better for working with the rest of the organization? Dealing with budgets, strategic plans from upper management, marketing etc?

Because - and I hate the fact that it’s this way - they need to ensure there is a salary gate for other positions at a similar level.

Part of the challenge of organizational management is making decisions structurally bound to prevent negotiations for every single possible response.

“Well Mike didn’t have a degree, so why not me?” Would become the next big thing

The “Simple” answer is, don’t have dumb gates for hiring and have your managers actually behave like leaders who have a personal stake in the success of their business and hires.

Other than rare, personality driven cases, this approach isn’t even available as a concept for people who get into business for money or power - primarily because “the market” doesn’t reward training people, because the last century has shown that people with money don’t want to take the risk

>The “Simple” answer is, don’t have dumb gates for hiring and have your managers actually behave like leaders who have a personal stake in the success of their business and hires.

There's too much bureaucracy focused on CYA than being adults and properly talking with employees.

I think you're close but not quite there. I'm reminded of the scene from Office Space, where the Bobs say they prefer to avoid confrontation if possible.

>“Well Mike didn’t have a degree, so why not me?”

"Because you don't have the right degree" is an easier and less confrontational answer than the truth ("the position was filled nepotistically", "you know what you did but the incidents are not properly documented", etc.).

> Because - and I hate the fact that it’s this way - they need to ensure there is a salary gate for other positions at a similar level.

What evidence do you have to support this opinion as fact?

It has become popular to dismiss the benefits of higher education but I think there’s still immense value in completing an undergraduate education. An undergraduate degree demonstrates an ability to succeed in a multi-disciplinary environment and to work collaboratively with peers. It gives the student knowledge outside their core domain which creates opportunities for cross-pollination of ideas. The only argument against higher education is the cost which wasn’t a factor here.

One thing that China has, that the US does not is a marketplace like Alibaba. It's simply incredible how you can place an order for any component with a quantity slider that goes from "three" to "three full train-cars a day".

When starting a hardware product, it's so easy to buy small quantities at commercial prices, no questions asked.

In the US, it seems all sales is relationship-based. I need to fill out forms on bad websites, wait for emails from sales reps, who sniff out immediately that I only want a small order. The overhead for processing an order isn't deemed worth the time, and any US-based small-time project ends there.

Beautiful. Sounds like they’re doing with pens in Maryville what Tesla did with the Model S in Fremont.

> Peterson […] found that the factory could use robots to do an increasing share of the packing. But he decided to keep the employees who knew the company and convert their jobs to roles such as automation engineering. In that case, an employee would fix a robot instead of packing a box. Peterson estimates the average wage at its Maryville facility, which employs 550 staff, has gone up some 50% over the past five years—without a change in head count.

Isn't Tesla Fremont widely considered a failure?

The Model S was an expensive car with a bad reputation for quality. Then in 2017 they introduced the Model 3 and their "Alien Dreadnought" automation. That significantly delayed mass production of the Model 3 and almost bankrupted the company.

Tesla turned things around by building a factory in Shanghai, and learning how to build a car from the Chinese. They then basically copied the Shanghai factory to Germany.

That was a Musk problem. His two lead manufacturing execs quit when he wanted the plant automation installed without the usual factory testing, to cut the time to production in half. It didn't work. For a while, Tesla Fremont had a huge work force working in tents in the parking lot. Cost per car went up and quality went down, but cars came out.

Tesla still seems to have quality problems, and never delivered the promised $30,000 car. Although BYD did.

Chevy did, with the Bolt.

> Although BYD did

I don't believe this is true, due to the < $30k cars not meeting US safety regulations.

They're meeting the EU regulations and selling the entry level electric for €23k in Germany.

I can't attribute their lack of presence in the US market to them when their cars face a 100% tariff.

What's are your metrics of "failure"?

Fremont factory has produced 3 million cars, in a manufacturing hostile/barren California (and thus Nevada gigafactory), covering ~50% cars produced yearly. [1]

> Tesla turned things around by building a factory in Shanghai

~50% are made in China, with ~50% of those being sold in China (well until this year), avoiding significant Chinese tariffs. [2]

[1] https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-fremont-nevada-3-million/

[2] Nice historic graph, including poor sales this year. https://carnewschina.com/2025/03/10/tesla-exports-3911-cars-...

Just wanted to point out that California, for being barren of manufacturing and hostile to it, is actually the largest manufacturer in the USA in terms of people employed and economic output.

https://nam.org/mfgdata/

> in terms of people employed

It's also multiple times the size of most states. Per capita is probably a better metric, where it ranks 34th.

> and economic output

I can't find the raw data, so I'm not sure what they're counting. It says "computer and electronics" is highest, which is 2x above chemical, which makes me very suspicious. I work in manufacturing that happens 100% in China. Would I be counted? Are they counting AMD or Qualcomm, where their chips are manufactured in Taiwan (or Arizona)? How much of this is military/government contracts (which aren't subject to many of these pressures)?

That's because it's so much more populous. That link shows that CA is 34th in % of workers employed in manufacturing (similar to TX and MA). CA is tops in many, many absolute measures because it has almost 10M more people than the next state, TX.

Is the argument then that it's better to manufacture in Rhode Island than it is Los Angeles?

Sure, and the vast majority of those 3 million were cars were built after they disassembled their "alien dreadnought" factory and Tom Zhu et al went to China to learn how to build cars, and brought that knowledge back.

And all the other US manufactures originally learned how from Japan.

Some of their original manufacturing ideas didn't work out, and they iterated to better processes. That's not failure. That's plain old boring fucking engineering.

Do you think China is bad or something? Everyone, especially in the industry, knows that there's more manufacturing expertise in China, because that's where the vast majority of the world has outsourced their manufacturing (and pollution), for decades, and the forseable future. Just ask the politicians, who have been singing "manufacturing is never coming back to the US" for decades, to justify their policies that prevent people from manufacturing in their backyards.

> And all the other US manufactures originally learned how from Japan.

Who learned Kaizen from an American.

And the good ideas go round and round.

> Tesla turned things around by building a factory in Shanghai, and learning how to build a car from the Chinese.

That has very little to do with Fremont the facility.

The Fremont facility is where Toyota showed GM how to build cars properly--an expensive lesson which GM and Tesla both decided to ignore.

I would suggest that the real "innovation" of Tesla's foreign factories was simply getting them far enough away from Musk that he couldn't easily screw them up ...

no, that factory makes a ton of cars. had teething problems like every other car factory in the world. source: my significant other worked at tesla for a decade, now at Rivian.

>Sounds like they’re doing with pens in Maryville what Tesla did with the Model S in Fremont.

Hopefully without all the illegal toxic waste dumping, forcing people to work during quarantine and ignoring crazy homophobic / racist environments and suing/harassing whistleblowers. The Fremont plant is not something to strive for in any way other than "it's a plant that manufactures things in the US".

corporations doing retraining, what a concept

So a business used automation to decrease COGS? Doesn’t sound noteworthy.

What's noteworthy is that an American company didn't immediately fire its employees to make way for the cheapest experts it could find for the new roles. Instead, they retrained their existing people for the new roles.

It's a small thing but it's these little victories that give me a much needed ethics boner.

doubt it's some altruistics thing, likely retraining existing box packers were cheaper than hiring tech grads

Seems like you and Adam Smith put different weights on the value of altruism.

> It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.

No one implied they were doing this altruistically. It's noteworthy simply because they bucked the conventional wisdom (offshore everything, US manufacturing cannot compete etc etc) and succeeded financially.

The US has (near as I can tell) forgotten even the basics.

Like a coder writing code (by hand!) to make things more efficient somewhere, also seems noteworthy now.

I don’t know what forgotten the basics means, but US manufacturing output in terms of USD is quite high relative to its population:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing

17%+ with 4% of the world’s population means there must be some kind of automation expertise.

Measuring in currency can be rather misleading. Consider one country that manufactures a billion dollars of diamonds per year, and another that manufactures half a billion dollars of steel per year.

Which has more industrial might? You need to compare what's actually being made and how much to draw conclusions.

I really despise this talking point.

Before Boeing had its epic fails, usually they were talked about as the prototypical “we make airplanes instead of rubber dog shit out of Hong Kong” example.

But it neglected to show that Boeing outsourced a huge portion of the actual skillsets needed to build each individual component.

There is utterly no comparison to $100B of airplanes being sold a year vs. $100B of various goods of diverse complexity and quality in terms of impact to the economy, workers, manufacturing knowledge, and even national security.

If we had simply gone up market and retained useful engineering and manufacturing skills/talent pipeline/capacity I’d totally agree. But we have not. Not to any appreciable degree by any metric other than numbers on a spreadsheet.

We are talking about this in a thread discussing manufacturing markers in the US as some sort of large win. If this article had been discussed in these contexts 60 years ago it’d have been seen as utterly pathetic.

The US has steadily gone ‘up market’, and automated heavily in most industries.

Skills like manual machining, and manual welding have gotten much harder to find and a smaller portion of the economy.

As to if that matters?

What Sharpie did in the US is super simple table stakes for manufacturing anywhere, it’s only notable because it can be used in a larger political story.

It makes sense that this is possible. It's a very high volume item, with limited parts. The raw materials are not unique to any one location. If you have the capital to invest in a highly automated production line (which I'm sure cost many million USD), you will eventually get the ROI and the costs will be similar in many locations around the world. Labor costs are a small portion of the COGS (cost of goods sold). If most of the market is in the US, then shipping cost savings probably outweigh the higher labor and real estate costs. Energy costs and raw materials are likely similar enough to be a wash.

Contrast this with consumer electronics, especially new products. Those have huge benefits from the concentration of the supply chain and the agility of the supply chain in Southern China. That doesn't exist in the US.

Gift link: https://www.wsj.com/business/sharpie-us-production-cost-cutt...

It is hard to discern if this is an uplifting story, or a rather depressing story about regaining lost basic manufacturing process skills. Any and all countries should be able to make basic and essential things.

Anytime humans create systems that allow a group of individuals to orchestrate a higher energy output of productive activity, it’s an uplifting story because it’s literally how wealth is generated for society.

Unless all of that new wealth is captured and horded by a handful of people.

Don't confuse wealth with money - they are opposites, or maybe two sides of a coin.

Wealth is the stuff - in this case pens. Money is what you get in exchange.

Society gets more pens with less human effort required - that's a win, and has nothing to do with money.

Money (increased profits, share price, etc) is what happens when you create the more stuff with less effort that society gets.

Money is how we keep track of how much net wealth (stuff) someone or some company has created for society.

This rarely happens 100%, as you see in the article the employees make more when they enable higher energy efficiency.

The corollary is that it rarely happens that 100% of the earned gains goes to those who actually earned them. If there was actual competition for their labor then that would change.

I’m having trouble figuring out from the body of the article what the way mentioned in its title actually was.

There’s a list of nice business steps the company took (and I can’t imagine starting work on the problem in 2018 hurt either), but I don’t expect they were the only ones to take any specific one, so why did Sharpie in particular succeed? What’s the recipe? Automate the crap out of your assembly line and promote (a lucky few among) your former assembly-line workers (who you definitely did not fire when you got high on automation) to technicians? I can’t imagine that’s a rare thought; yet this seems to be a rare success story.

It's a brand with household name recognition. It's also a bit of a plug piece (NWL has had a rough decade).

The most newsworthy detail here is probably the WSJ publishing an article that could be construed as somewhat pro-labor.

I suspect there is quite profit margin in Sharpies compared to other similar markers from the global market. Exactly what a tariff would do by insulating them from a global market pricing, allowing flexibility in rearranging their costs. *even considering quality issues.

Amazing that made in USA with competive price to if made in China Manufacturing in China is at wxpwnxw of worker conditions and more lax OHS lays and more lax environmental and worker rights, working longer hours and more days.

"wxpwnxw"?

It has to be a super strange autocorrect for "expense", but I don't know why anyone is typing wxpwnxw a lot ...

Thanks, that fits, along with the mis-typed keys all being left-handed as fluoridation noted.

It's probably just a typo on a normal keyboard. All the missed keys are on the left hand side.

A few people are discussing Newell Brands Inc (NWL)'s poor stock performance over the last decade, and how that makes it hard to sell as a success story. As bgwalter points out, there was a large drop of NWL's share price, particularly between june 2017 ($53.35 / share) and june 2019 ($15.36 USD).

Looking at historical financial metrics [1] over this period provides some insight about the stock price drop:

                  2016 2017 2018 2019
  Revenue ($b)      13   15    9   10
  Op Margin(%)       9   10    7    8
  EBIT Margin(%)     9   13  -91   -6

A Forbes article from 2019 [2] provides some context that may explain large revenue drop:

> Over the last year or so, the company has offloaded many non-core businesses (such as sporting goods maker Rawlings, packaging manufacturer Waddington, and Pure Fishing – a maker of fishing equipment) to trim its portfolio and cut costs. Moreover, the asset sales have helped the company prune down its debt, which stood at about $6.7 billion at the end of June, down from close to $11 billion two years ago.

Aha: searching for "Newell restated financials" dug up this interesting gem [3]. In 2023 the SEC charged Newell and the former CEO Michael Polk with misleading investors:

> The SEC’s order finds that, in 2016 and 2017, Newell and Polk took actions that increased the company’s publicly disclosed core sales growth in ways that were out of step with Newell’s actual but undisclosed sales trends, allowing the company to announce “strong” or “solid” results in quarters it internally described as disappointing due to shortfalls in sales. According to the order, Newell pulled sales forward into earlier quarters without adequate disclosure and engaged in accounting practices that were inconsistent with GAAP, while overriding its internal accounting controls. Collectively, these measures gave the misleading appearance that Newell had achieved core sales growth in line with its targets and deprived investors of information relevant to an accurate and complete understanding of Newell’s actual sales trends.

So former CEO Polk engaged in financial shenanigans during 2016 and 2017 to cook the books and make sales growth appear better to investors than they actually were, shaping NWL as a growth story. They weren't able to maintain the charade in 2018.

[1] https://www.morningstar.com/stocks/xnas/nwl/key-metrics

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2019/10/24/ho...

[3] https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2023-210

Sharpie is special and can make one thing essentially forever.

It was a surprise learning how applicable your statement is when I was selling technology products into consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies. Consumer preference is very hard to change once it is established, and leading CPG companies spend an enormous amount establishing that preference.

I was surprised how bad Sharpie markers were, when I first came across them here in Europe a few years ago. I had started hearing the word, where we used to say "permanent marker".

But the smell! Yuerk. I don't know what it is, but I find it awful. The smell is the only problem, but as far as I'm concerned it's enough that I'll never buy another.

The similar-quality European or Japanese permanent markers don't smell anywhere near as bad, but have surely lost market share here due to Sharpie's effective marketing.

Newell Brands stock price fell sharply during the first Trump administration from $53 and is now at $5.40.

Marketing this as a success story of U.S. manufacturing is insane. If the WSJ honestly thinks the outlook is better now, it should at least provide the history and say why (and who provided the investments for automation given that Trump is a sharpie user).

You make a good point, I did a little digging and it looks like the historical share price drop around 2018 is superficially explained by a big decrease in revenue and a big drop in EBIT, and those two changes are explained by Newell restructuring and divesting a bunch of non core brands, and also by accounting fraud.

Great, now the few insular successes of manufacturing in the U.S. will be trotted out as support for deranged economic policies :(.

The economy that you and I experience? Or just the economy that Wall Street experiences?

I can't decide if that's the same, or different from, trotting out the very few tariff-boosting economists in support of deranged economic policies.

Tariffs are an inefficient tax on consumption. If the parties keep failing to agree to figure out how to increase revenue, this is the best stop gap we could hope for. Especially if it generates over $1T.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/19/economy/us-tariff-rebate-chec...

Why are you implying that the goal is to increase revenue? This admin also pushed for tax cuts simultaneously and the budget they passed added to the deficit again.

Tariffs at their current rate canceled the deficit added by the tax cuts according to experts.

https://www.bestmoney.com/tax-relief/learn-more/how-trump-ta... is more of a personal finance website, but it reports (from the Tax Foundation), over a 10 year timeframe, a $3.8T total deficit increase over previous law. (CBO estimates are less favorable on deficit increases.) The same article estimates $2.1T in tariff revenue based on policy in early September.

Seems closer to plugging half the gap than "cancelled"

You're joking, right? Show me the money.

Even if true (it's not) why are we giving tax breaks to billionaires to cancel out revenue instead of paying off our 29T deficit?

What experts that are not part of this administration? He fired people who gave him numbers he didn’t like already like the head of BLS so I don’t trust any numbers self reported by them.

And oh, is this also with that made up math they used to say that continuing the existing tax cuts past their expiration date didn’t count as increasing the deficit?

Yes, Trump got 17 trillion dollars. pinkie