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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.

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.

I’m no fan of Walmart but I understand the value of having them sourcing here in America. Its especially true these days with all the hurdles faced by business.

There is just no such thing as a factory that produces 1 part for 1 industry.

I used to work for Astro Cap here in Michigan making fiberglass truck caps and lids. We also made LEER and Tonneau caps and lids. It used to crack me up hearing people talk about which was better when they came from the same place and the only difference was the label we stuck on them. I once bought a set of cheap wrenches and found that one of them was a top of the line Craftsman wrench.

Well Cuz, I fully agree that this nation is in severe trouble. I keep seeing places closed down every day. In fact, down town, a bar-b-q restaurant that had been in business since the 1960s closed. Simply said we cannot afford it anymore and shut the doors. Two weeks later, the building is torn down and now a new building for something else to go up. Probably another one of those danged CASH stores. There is one every two blocks on this highway for payday loans. There are several bar-b-q places in town and they are full at lunch everyday, so it could not be lack of just people coming in. It had to be the taxes, etc. piled on him and he had enough.