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The more Walmart locally sources, the more other businesses will locally source.

Its amazing to me how little most Americans understand about how manufacturing actually works. They get their impressions from the auto industry or some other big industry like Boeing when they aren’t really typical of manufacturing as a whole.

Those big factories produce 1 product day in and day out. The parts suppliers don’t operate that way. The plastics shop that produces wheel covers for GM or Toyota are running a half dozen different secondary jobs on the side to supply different customers and industries.

I worked in a shop where our primary job was for Cadillac but we also made Ford, Toyota, and Jeep parts. Occasionally they made toys like frisbees or the plastic playhouses. In a sense, the big jobs help support the small jobs.

The more Walmart locally sources, the more other businesses will locally source.

Its amazing to me how little most Americans understand about how manufacturing actually works. They get their impressions from the auto industry or some other big industry like Boeing when they aren’t really typical of manufacturing as a whole.

Those big factories produce 1 product day in and day out. The parts suppliers don’t operate that way. The plastics shop that produces wheel covers for GM or Toyota are running a half dozen different secondary jobs on the side to supply different customers and industries.

Bingo. It is a food chain. The largest companies buy from smaller ones, who buy from smaller ones.

This is what I keep saying, "new world order", but people are COMPLETELY clueless.

When the decision is made at the top by the top few financial elites of the world to move manufacturing to China en masse, small business will simply see their sales dry up.

Then... big companies buy up smaller companies, further consolidating control of the marketplace.

GE is a key company; they are enormous. People have no idea how much sourcing is under their control.

Due to higher productivity in the advanced countries relative to the less developed countries, it's actually cheaper to manufacture in the developed countries.

People think we can't make cheap plastic parts, for example. They think that's why so much plastic molding is done in China. But all it takes is the decision being made to do it here and do it profitably, and voila. This is proven by the large number of cheap things we do manfacture here, like styrofoam cups, etc., where the shipping doesn't work out.

Also there are tons of things that can be purchased today to make life easier for the small business that were not available years ago. It is amazing.

The real stoppers for small business are a) no sourcing from big business and b) the risks of being sued, risks of being singled out by your own government and waylayed every way imaginable from parking tickets to irs audits, one employee groped another, you didn't hire a muslim, you looked crossways at a sodomite, etc. When people see the crazy punitive stuff that goes on, they see a potential barrier to making business worthwhile. All a business owner thinks is who is going to come along and accuse my business of something, I can't defend from the trumped up accusation, so after a lot of legal expense my business goes in the cr@pper anyway.

The only businesses people think are worthwhile are ones with a fat profit margin, or ones where you can at least jack up your profit margin quite a bit.

Cuz after all, no matter how much you make, you're looking at wildly escalating prices for basics like food and real estate taxes.