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Posted on 11/23/2001 7:49:01 AM PST by expose

THE RED, WHITE AND BLUE

BuyAmerican.com

'Made in U.S.A.'-only website's sales soar since Sept. 11

By Art Moore

WorldNetDaily.com

The surge of American patriotism in response to terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon has lifted the fortunes of an Internet-based retailer that sells only products made in the United States.

BuyAmerican.com has quadrupled its sales since Sept. 11, says Jesse Laird, who helped found the company with his brother Richard in 1999.

Dismayed by the increasing migration of American manufacturing jobs, mostly to China and Mexico, the Lairds launched their retail site in the spring of 1999. The events of Sept. 11 have caused many more American consumers to share their concern, Jesse Laird believes. "People are starting to think, 'Hey we'd better pay attention to what's going on here before we sell the whole farm and not even realize it,'" he said.

One customer, galvanized by the terrorist attacks, wrote the company of her plan to have a "100 percent Made in the U.S.A. Christmas this year." She maintained that "Americans have prostituted themselves for the want of cheap goods" and wants her grandchildren, who will be in the workforce in 10 to 20 years, "to have the same opportunities that I had as a young adult."

The company, based in rural northwestern Pennsylvania, sells more than 40,000 products from nearly 700 vendors. Goods include furniture, clothing, books, lawn and garden supplies, art and jewelry. Naturally, patriotic items are flying off warehouse shelves.

"Some of the companies we get flags from are six and eight weeks behind because they can't even get the material," Laird said.

But China, which has a trade surplus with the U.S. of more than $80 billion, also has benefited from the patriotic surge. In the week after the terrorist attacks, two Chinese firms each received orders for more than half a million American flags.

Some customers say they are attracted to BuyAmerican.com for moral reasons. One buyer wrote of a commitment he made eight years ago not to buy products from China. The country's post-Sept. 11 mood is "a great opportunity to educate Americans not only about the terrorists in the world, but also about our other enemies," he wrote. "China is certainly no friend of the United States, yet we subsidize that county to the tune of billions every year."

When Congress debated China's granting of "permanent normal trade relations" last year, the National Labor Committee for Human Rights issued a report that documented "brutal working conditions" in Chinese factories where products are made for export to the United States. The report cited American companies such as Nike, Wal-Mart, Timberland, Huffy, JanSport and the Kathie Lee (Gifford) label.

Human-rights groups say that political prisoners, including leaders of unregistered religious groups, have been forced to work on exported products under slave-labor conditions. A Chinese pastor in a labor camp near Beijing worked long hours hand-sewing soccer balls, causing bleeding and injury to his hands every day, London-based Christian Solidarity Worldwide reported last year.

Laird says he stays abreast of human rights in China, but his company is mostly concerned about the lost American jobs.

"The general public is just like an ostrich … oblivious to what's going on in China," he said. "When they go to buy a pair of sneakers or a shirt, if it's a quarter of the price of American-made, we buy it. We're just looking for a better deal and we just don't realize that we are slitting our throats."

Proponents of international free trade, however, argue that the jobs flow both ways. The Japanese automaker Honda, for example, manufactures most of its U.S. sales in the U.S.

But BuyAmerican.com insists on products by American companies made in America, Laird said. Some vendors who want certain products sold on the site argue that while their factories are in China, production is supervised by American engineers working with an American patent. "We don't care – it's still made in China," he said. "If it doesn't have the good old 'Made in U.S.A.' tag on it, we take it off our store. We are very adamant about that."

Laird acknowledged, though, that under U.S. Federal Trade Commission guidelines a product can have an American label even though some of its parts are manufactured overseas. "As long as it has a 'Made in the U.S.A.' tag – we don't get into a contest on things like an electronic switch, or a piece of material or something," he said. "We're trying to be up front with the people as much as we can, but in this fast-moving world economy things change at such a rate."

BuyAmerican.com office manager Don Probst said he realizes that the sales spike since Sept. 11 will eventually wane, but believes "25 percent will stay with the buy-American theme as long as they can find American products." And no competitors have appeared online, he said.

Laird's hometown of Altoona, however, has had plenty of competition. The central Pennsylvanian town lost about 4,000 jobs this year, many of them to China and Mexico, he said. And the economic uncertainty brought by Sept. 11 has only made things worse for many employers.

In contrast, for Laird, it's been the best of times. "It's sorry to say, the (terrorist) disaster and what happened," he said, "but one man's misfortune is another man's fortune. To us it's been a bonanza. I think it's been a bonanza for the country because it's brought the country closer together. It's brought people back to God, I think."

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