As a Canadian, "Made in the USA" is currently a mark against, and I would only consider buying that product if it was absolutely the only remotely reasonable option.
Not sure that it's a fair test, tbh.
I try to buy 'locally made' products because I respect the story of their company, and their efforts to build up some type of community.
If I had a choice between 'made here' or 'made there' at the checkout stage, then I'd probably think it's a bit of a scam.
I think 'locally made' is a business choice, not a product choice.
I always like to give this Welsh jeans firm as an example: https://hiutdenim.co.uk/ (sorry if it's advertising, I've no connection to them).
This article is completely non-rigorous and doesn't mean anything, but it shows what "simple" thinking about problems leads to. They would have had to gather enough data points to determine the price that people would pay to be meaningful in just about any way.
This is why it's important to have academic rigor and people who study specific problems deeply in positions of power. This ignores potential economies of scale cost reductions and paying more for home made products is circularly dependent on earning more from selling those higher cost products.
I think the most interesting question by far in this space is what percent of every purchase ends up going to housing, food, or health care. If you buy a burger, what percent of the cost of that burger is going directly into housing via the workers wages?
I wonder how valid that test is, actually. Lots of people are aware that claims of "Made in USA" often don't actually mean the thing was made in the USA in the intuitive sense of the phrase and so disregard them.
Regardless, I would fully expect that most people would be swayed by price, especially when the price differential is as large as in that test.
Disclaimer: I don’t think the current admin policies are a good way to bring back American manufacturing, if that is their main goal.
One point I don’t see discussed much is how American physical goods companies currently don’t really have access to the huge bottom chunk of the price pyramid. This limits the benefits of scale, and makes their products more expensive than they would be otherwise.
Right now if someone starts a small physical product company in America, they pretty much have to target people with excess discretionary spending ability. Once they go for the lower part of the pyramid that is much more price sensitive, they get killed by foreign competition on labor and environmental compliance costs that the American company has to pay and the foreign company does not.
If American manufacturing ever does come back, I would expect prices to come down significantly simply due to again having access to market scale.
This is, of course, a puff piece of writing. You don't have to look further than this phrase: _"The new unit cost us nearly 3x more to produce. To maintain our margins, we’d have to sell it for $239."_
How else does 2x become 3x, unless you're trying to make your burden sound more dramatic. uug. But what interests me in this discussion is the phrase _"maintain our margins"_. American companies off-shored manufacturing to maintain their margins. Now they have a taste of that cheap foreign labor, its oh so difficult to come back cheerfully to manufacture in the US.
> "If policymakers and pundits want to rebuild American industry, they need to grapple with this truth: idealism doesn’t always survive contact with a price tag."
Or, business' foreign labor priced margins.
I suspect the vast majority of customers will go with the cheaper option, unless there's a quality advantage for the more expensive one (which I don't think there is in this case?).
There's also a difference between "made in" and "assembled in" in other cases (but not sure that applies in this case?).
For garments at least, you _can_ have affordable, Made in US by unionised labour products [1], if you cut your margins.
People complain about CoGs but let’s be real, a lot of products imported have crazy margins put on them by the middleman. You’ve probably seen “I bought this off Alibaba for $.50 and reselling for $25”
Thank you sincerely for running this experiment. Unfortunately, we didn't learn anything new.
People buy cheap. They don't buy quality, they don't buy local, they don't buy green: they buy cheap.
It takes more than a slogan.
It's almost impossible to justify a significant percentage increase in price based solely on a questionable declaration of manufacturing location.
There should be a quality improvement that goes along with the location and price increase. And that used to be the impression, but I don't think that's the case anymore. "Made in the USA" used to mean that it was a quality product, not a cheap knockoff. Now the meaning is not so clear. Hasn't been for a long time.
The text says specifically that the quality is identical no matter where the product was manufactured. When people say they'd pay more for American made products, I think they mean it in the context of what that used to imply, not that they're going to pay nearly double for exactly the same quality.
If people would spend more for the US product, we wouldn't need the tariffs.
I don't understand why people are so incredulous that virtue signalling is rampant and even the "good guys" (whatever group you want to attribute that to) is mostly full of people who know the right thing to say, will gladly say it repeatedly to garner praise, but will not follow it when it comes to them.
Me, or anyone else who has tried a "virtuous venture", could have easily told this company not to waste their time. The take away here isn't "they screwed this up" or "This isn't a true test". The takeaway is "People are extremely self serving when the perceived impact is small and no one is there to judge them for it." Plan your business accordingly.
I absolutely pay more for local goods. In the grocery store I try to purchase things from my state, or at least adjacent states. If it’s something that will last for decades or something I will use constantly I will absolutely pay more for made in US, Canada or Mexico.
But, this study feels a bit off - as much as Americans aspire to be wealthy, the vast majority are not and have to make compromises and can’t always justify paying double for something out of some economic or emotional principle.
Of course, I learned a long time ago that “stuff” does very little for my quality of life so I try not to be acquisitive. Except for guitars, sigh.
This doesn't surprise me. As much as I would love to buy locally made products, in my economic condition I have to stretch my dollar as far as it can go. If it is the difference between buying a Dyson vs a XISXKE, well the Dyson is better for my money. But for the same shower head, that product will not scream quality unless I'm in the market to buy a higher end product. I may emotionally respond with, nobody else in the USA is supporting locally made products, why should I? I will however go out of my way to buy Canadian over American out of spite.
Given how gutted the regulatory agencies are today, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see surge in fraudulent claims of “Made in USA” items that actually trace manufacturing to another country.
Maybe “Made in USA, China”
The choice between Made in Asia and Made in the USA can be more complicated. For instance, I will acknowledge that 85% of price difference is a lot, but then I'd rather own less stuff: less clothing, less food, certainly no goodie bags. If anything, I hate that the house is filled with stuff that family members bought for now good reason except this jolt of pleasure at the time of purchase.
I strongly suspect many items marked with things like "made proudly in the USA" type items are about to be show to have non-US sources.
They should have lowered the cost of the USA product over multiple days to find the price point at which people would choose it.
The thing is, if made in the USA does not come with a better, greener or more ethical, who cares?!
Water filtration is an area where sophisticated customers want the best filter that meets usage requirements and budgets! If you double the cost, and there’s no extra quality improvement, you’re SOL.
also: proprietary in a shower head is at best some sort of activated charcoal plus some spices. I did some reading after my sister and her husband got an osmotic filter plus de fluoridation for their pending infants. The reading gave me the take away that for good filtration you have a tough time actually doing a good job unless you’re using an osmotic filter plus filter media where the water has a long dwell time. Some of this is touched on in a recent prject farm video. Point being a filter in the shower head isn’t doing much nor efficiently.
I’m honestly surprised so many comments here are nitpicking or expressing skepticism about this little test.
Low price vs foreign sourcing has been tested trillions of times over decades and low price largely won. How do you think we got to the supply chains and economy we have today? How do you think Walmart (which started off selling Made in USA BTW) and Dollar Tree and Target and Amazon etc. got so big?
People like low prices. They like them more than a lot of other things they also like.
> This wasn’t a failure of marketing—it was a referendum on price.
I don't think so. Not only is the price almost double, but there no way to discern the USA version, and the disclaimer says that some materials cannot be sourced in the USA.
A consumer that isn't price sensitive and wants made in the USA would still obviously reject this.
This is why we need to transition the USD away from being the world reserve currency.
https://www.hudsonbaycapital.com/documents/FG/hudsonbay/rese...
I imagine zero people care about the manufacturing provenance of their shower-head and many other household utility items. This is just hot-button-issue glommering marketing fluff.
FWIW, such country-of-origin labels are largely misleading when it comes to most durable goods which, by design, are made up of an amalgam of parts sourced from multiple supply chains.
"To maintain our margins, we’d have to sell it for $239."
Here we have the issue. With tariffs many companies cannot maintain their margin. So they have to reduce their greed.
That is of course absolutely terrible and the real reason why every company complains about tariffs.
No company would care about higher prices if they could maintain their margin.
I would pay more for "made in the usa", but it usually goes along with a trusted brand, and usually for a product with decent design and durability.
Think snap-on hand tools or darn-touch socks.
There are plenty of brands that don't have much meaning behind them though, having cut costs or sold out.
It seems to me that this is not a fair test. There is sentiment and there is budget. A product that costs a little more is one thing but double the price hits budget barriers. Most people do not have 80%+ discretionary budget.
Everytime I think of made in USA, I'm reminded of Americans Italian and Irish mobs racking up prices on repairs of everything from cars to appliances so high that it even drove people into the streets.
I would pay more (up to the budget) if I knew I was getting a better product. I don't care where it was made.
No surprise with this test except a few people from the US bought made in USA. That was a bit of a surprise.
I wonder if the strikethrough had any subtle influence on the decision making
> Our bestselling model—manufactured in Asia (China and Vietnam)—sells for $129. But this year, as tariffs jumped from 25% to 170%, we wondered: Could we reshore manufacturing to the U.S. while maintaining margins to keep our lights on?
This is disingenuous. According to Amazon price tracking, the price was $129 in 2024 as well, so they are apparently not maintaining margins on the China made product.
My understanding of what Trump is trying is forcing us to have no choice by making both versions insanely overpriced with overseas being more
I honestly believe if the Trump administration really intends to bring manufactuing back to the US, a permanent double-digit/3-digit tariff and a stable regime of 8+ years will do the trick. Companies will be able to plan accordingly.
But, if the tariff keeps changing on a daily basis with no one sure of his ultimate goal, and the fact that there is a four-year term limit which significant limits visibility beyond that, companies couldn't make such decision. It takes more than four years to build a factory and get it into stable operations.
MAGA and Trump don’t even make their hats in America
It’s all one big con
"Everyone"?
That's not an A/B test, it's a choice. A/B means, each one is displayed to different customers as the only option to then see who wanted what.
In this case, a choice is more insightful than A/B.
What I find more interesting is that people give a shit about shower heads.
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> The only difference? One was labeled “Made in Asia” and priced at $129. The other, “Made in the USA,” at $239. [85% more expensive]
> And many are willing to pay a premium for domestically made goods. Nearly half (48%) say they’d be willing to pay around 10–20% more. 17% say they’d be willing to pay ~30% more for an American-made product over an imported one. - https://www.retailbrew.com/stories/2022/07/28/consumers-will...
The article does not say how many would pay 85% more, but since the number more than halved from 10% to 30% more, I would hazard not many.