Posted on 05/14/2019 5:26:58 PM PDT by tcrlaf
Williams-Sonoma CEO Laura Alber said Monday that the company shuffled its operations over the past year in anticipation of high tariffs on imports from China.
The home goods retailer made adjustments over the past year believing that tariffs on Chinese imports could reach 25%.
“I think that you’re better off preparing for the worst,” she said in a one-on-one interview with “Mad Money” host Jim Cramer Monday in San Francisco. “Unfortunately that pessimism has come true, and we are more prepared.”
Williams-Sonoma shifted some furniture production to Vietnam, Indonesia and the United States after President Donald Trump slapped 10% duties on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods last year. Higher tariffs, at more than double that rate, went into effect Friday. Chinese officials said Monday the country plans to retaliate by raising tariffs on $60 billion of U.S. goods.
In December, Williams-Sonoma announced that it would open a facility in Tupelo, Mississippi, in January and add hundreds of jobs to manufacture upholstered furniture. Alber said it’s beneficial to bring jobs back to the United States because “the cost from the freight coming from Asia offsets the costs of the labor,” as the company learned after opening its first Sutter Street Manufacturing unit in North Carolina.
The furniture maker owns the Pottery Barn, West Elm and Williams-Sonoma Home brands.
“We looked at opening another unit in Tupelo and then bolstering up our other two West Coast and East Coast manufacturing units,” Alber said. “And so we’re hiring … 500 people, and we’ve got 140 right now in Tupelo. We need to hire more, and we need to hire more on the coasts, as well.”
(Excerpt) Read more at cnbc.com ...
Don’t see how hiring more U.S. workers helps WS with the price hikes the government forces via tariffs on goods from China.
Normally these stupid government controls cause companies to have to lay people off.
Good.
For what they charge, they have no business getting ANYthing that touches food from Red China. Years ago, I paid dearly to get my wife a proper crepe pan. At least it was made in France.
Gee if only American businesses actually produced AMERICAN products we would not have to bend over and kiss China’s ass..gee what a concept..making American goods IN America!
Three little pigs is a wise tale.
Green Jelly - Three Little Pigs
Just because.
They will the very nanosecond it makes more economic sense to do so. *THIS* is what President Trump understands; all the rules, regulations and bureaucracy humanly possible will never work, but strategically (if perhaps temporarily painfully) using tariffs is the right way to do it.
Think of the tax code in the 1950s. The left gets it wrong because they go on and on about how high the highest rates were. Technically, yes...... BUT few paid those rates, and for the very reason that there were strong incentives to invest and spend on American goods and services and infrastructure. Taxes have always been a vehicle for shaping behavior.
Yes, some will be hurt by cheap Chinese crap being made as expensive as American. So be it, it’s worth it to the country in the long run.
the President understands that we’ve got to fight the Chinese NOW when we can win an economic war AND a conventional one, rather than in 30-40 years, when either would be hopeless; the Chinese can plan decades out, the drawback to a Republic or a Democracy is that it can’t.
Well, if you don’t want to believe then you can just ignore it.
Tariffs to force production out of ONE country is very different from tariffs on all or many countries.
Put tariffs on everybody and you mostly cut your own throat.
Put tariffs on one country and you cut theirs.
Why am I not surprised that you can't see it?
Could be why you're not running WS.
I believe that the Chinese have seriously underestimated the long term effects of their behavior. What happened this week will reverberate well into the next decade regardless of 2020.
Using the government's deadly force for social engineering belongs in a marxist hellhole, not in these United States. The only proper, moral, function of taxes is to raise the revenue necessary to fund the legitimate (in the US, constitutional) functions of government. Anything else is theft and oppression.
I always wondered if that were the case, it sure seemed like it would be. Good to get confirmation that I was right. 8>)
I don’t think it’s commonly the case that freight costs are that important,.
Interestingly, freight costs would be less for the Chinese if US goods were transported back by the same vessels that brought the Chinese goods.
See: That is the free market too - not a zero-sum game.
“Don’t see how hiring more U.S. workers helps WS with the price hikes the government forces via tariffs on goods from China. Normally these stupid government controls cause companies to have to lay people off.”
If your “reasoning” was correct,then no one should EVER hire an American worker and ALL manufacturing should be done off shore ... because it would be cheaper ...
Then you didn’t read the article. The WS CEO explained it thoroughly.
Agree that in a perfect world that would be the case. But governments since the invention of same have used taxes to discourage behaviors they don’t like. It didn’t take an enlightenment economist to figure out that if you tax something you often get less of it, if you subsidize something you often get more of it (black markets aside)...
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