Mapping Your Global Products
I have listed 30 items I use in one day. 56 percent of the items are not made in the United States. They are manufactured in different countries and then brought to the U.S. to be distributed. Only 43 percent are manufactured in the United States. Most of the objects we interact with everyday are made in other countries. The main reason is cost. It simply costs less money to manufacture things in other countries. Most of the things I use are made in china and other countries (see map). If most of the products we own are made in China what does this say about us as a country? Is it good to import so many things? What I have observed is that if manufacturing all products in the USA occurs, there will be a significant increase in product prices because of all the regulations and the requirements. For example if Apple manufacturing plants here became unionized it would be worse. Take Twinkies for example, they went bankrupt and shut down everywhere due to unreasonable union demands and requirements. Many electronic companies use Chinese labor because it costs exponentially less than US labor, the Chinese employees are paid miserably compared to American workers. “IPhones aren't made in America because they just can't be. The infrastructure and labor force doesn't exist at the levels necessary to support Apple's operations -- it's not even close.” (Rawson P.3) Most of the components used to make the IPhone are manufactured overseas, many of them only a short distance of the final assembly plant. Shipping the components to any US-based factories would result in greater costs, and even worse from Apple's perspective, manufacturing delays. "It costs more money to build in America," the reasoning goes; "You have to pay your workers more, you have to pay benefits, insurance, higher taxes. Everything costs more." (Rawson P.5) How this trend affects us as a country is this practice will have an overall positive effect on the US economy, since it saves money for companies, opens up opportunities for greater entrepreneurship in the US, and leads to more Americans holding higher level jobs. It’s an advantage globally, cultural intermingling increases and every nation tries to know more about the other nations cultural preferences. In this process, we are actually coming across things that we like and in the course of time adopt it. Since we share