Wolf

Manufacturing America’s Future - In America

Tom Wolf published this article on January 30, 2012 in Build your Business. Total Comments: 1 | Comment

Depending on whom you believe, manufacturing in the United States is either on the road to nowhere or it is making a neat little comeback.  Based on our experience, it is the latter:  manufacturing is coming back in the United States and that is a very good thing for our economy and our future, and it is a great thing for consumers throughout the world.  I believe it would come back faster, however, if more of us discarded our reflexive belief that America’s best years as a manufacturing champion are behind us.  The truth is American workers, working in plants located in the United States, can still produce goods that will compete favorably with anybody making anything anywhere in the world.

Of course there are plenty of persuasive reasons to discount America’s manufacturing prospects.  After all, we have to compete against nations with lower labor costs, less stringent regulatory standards, devalued currencies and increasingly competent manufacturing expertise.  This leads some to conclude that our only logical option is to raise the white flag.  For example, Peter Dizikes, writing in the January/February 2012 issue of MIT’s Technology Review (pp. M15-16) cites an Op Ed piece written in the New York Times by Steven Rattner suggesting that manufacturing doesn’t have much of a future in the United States.  In the article, Rattner characterizes efforts to justify or support the resurrection of American manufacturing as little more than “politically attractive happy talk.”  He predicts that manufacturing jobs will go the same route as agricultural jobs.

In the same Technology Review article, however, MIT professor Suzanne Berger disagrees with Mr. Rattner.  She argues that his analogy is a false one.  “In the case of agriculture, we’re eating all the food we can eat in the United States . . . In the case of manufactured goods our appetite is vastly greater than our ability to produce this stuff (p. M16).”  There is nothing inevitable, she concludes, about the decline of American manufacturing.  This is true in the high tech sector where research, development and innovation have traditionally given the United States an edge; but it is also true in the lower tech sectors that Professor Berger characterizes as “workhorses.”

Our experience in sourcing and selling kitchen cabinets, PVC decking, and trim products suggests that Professor Berger is right.  There really is nothing inevitable about the decline of American manufacturing in either the emerging technology sectors or the more traditional “workhorse” sectors like cabinet making.  Smart entrepreneurs can still create viable manufacturing operations in the United States, American workers can still turn out products that will compete with the best of what the global economy has to offer, and the American consumer market remains one of the richest and most accessible in the world.  All these things suggest that American made goods do in fact have a bright future.

Wolf Classic Cabinets are a case in point.  They are made in the United States by American workers out of mostly American made components and they are successfully competing – on both price and quality – with imported cabinets.  They are competing successfully because our customers like them better than the imports.  They like the prices, they like the way they look, and they like the way they work.  Installers like them too, especially their sturdy construction.

Wolf Cabinets are made in the United States because we decided to ignore the conventional wisdom that suggested that American manufacturing was dead.  We challenged the idea that products made in the United States could not compete with the products coming out of nations with lower labor costs, looser regulatory standards and devalued currencies.  So when we sent out our design and construction specifications to cabinet manufacturers all around the world, we included American manufacturers in our bid list.  And we were pleased to find that a manufacturer located in the United States came back with the best proposal.  The same thing happened with PVC decking and trim products.

We conclude, therefore, that American manufacturing has a bright future indeed.  This isn’t happy talk.  Nor is it wishful thinking.  Our conclusion is based on real-world experience – our own experience.  Our products are made in the United States because that is where we have found – after a thorough search – the best quality and the best prices to be.

Our goal in sourcing these products was to give our independent dealer customers the best values in some of the most important products they sell to serious do-it-yourselfers and professional contractors.  We searched the whole world for these products and we found them right here at home.  Conventional wisdom has it that we should not have been able to do that.  It turns out conventional wisdom was wrong.