[4thaccount]

Interesting article on doing more manufacturing in America. The problem is that this is an extremely expensive and niche product.

I want slightly more expensive products made in the USA and I'll pay a premium for it, but nothing astronomical.

If I can pay 20% more on coffee and chocolate to make sure the farmers were paid a living wage, we can do similar things in the US. I understand that US wages are much higher and make this more difficult, but it would be a step in the right direction. Globalism has brought down prices and made many things very cheap and affordable, but at what cost?

I'd like comments from anyone with more understanding of the issues.

[keeganjw]

Watches are a weird market in that a $30 one from Walmart keeps better time than pretty much any watch from a luxury brand costing $5000 or more. $500 is way more than the average person will spend on a watch but once you get into the watch world a little bit you start to become numb to prices and all of a sudden $500 seems dirt cheap. I don't think this is targeted to a normal person, but the type of people who already own tens of thousands of dollars in watches and will buy this as a novelty with out even blinking. It's a weird and very rich (elitist) market.

[Dirlewanger]

It can be elitist, but honestly what clothing accessory market doesn't have that cohort? There's so many decent options under $1000 it's insane (a little research to avoid upsold Chinese crap like MVMT Watches is necessary though).

[galangalalgol]

A thermally compensated crystal is one or two orders of magnitude more accurate than a ten dollar Casio or Timex. Less than one second per year.

That said, mostly you are right, a 5 million dollar patek will sell a few copies to someone...

It's good to be king I guess.

[anthonybsd]

http://www.sapphytimes.com/movement/ephoto_show.asp?PhotoID=...

This is just "normal" price. For a large production you can get an even larger discount. It's still a cheap movement.

[ljcn]

And that's a standard quartz; the specs say -10 to 20 s/month.

Still ~10x more accurate than a mechanical watch, but not ~200x more accurate as thermocompensated ones are (as mentioned in the message you were replying to).

[wbl]

Your body heat makes an excellent oven for a wristwatch.

[galangalalgol]

I've found the opposite. A cheap Casio lost less than a second in two years sitting on my desk, but a whole second in the month I wore it.

[SamReidHughes]

What. Both of those are insanely good numbers.

[anthonybsd]

> I don't think this is targeted to a normal person, but the type of people who already own tens of thousands of dollars in watches and will buy this as a novelty with out even blinking. It's a weird and very rich (elitist) market.

Yeah, and this "weird and very rich" market pretty much exclusively steers clear of anything that says "Quartz" on it. Hell, even state of the art mechanical movement like Seiko Spring Drive suffered from being associated with Quartz watches, even despite the fact that it had nothing to do with them. So there goes that theory.

More likely this looks like some executive at Timex finding some Shinola garbage at some local mall and going "Do that, just replicate whatever these guys are doing!" without first asking themselves "Is this business model even viable or profitable?"

[SamReidHughes]

> Hell, even state of the art mechanical movement like Seiko Spring Drive suffered from being associated with Quartz watches, even despite the fact that it had nothing to do with them.

They have a quartz oscillator controlled by an integrated circuit! Replacing a motor with a generator is neat, but the real trick is that there's no way for mechanical imperfections to affect the rate, making it easier to manufacture.*

* Caveat being that I haven't made them, power reserve is the real game there, and they don't seem to be cutting corners.

[anthonybsd]

The thing with Spring drive is that Quartz oscillation in it while used for the same purpose (time keeping) is used in an entirely different fashion. Being a mechanical watch admirer I consider it more in the realm of automatics than in the realm of mechanical watches. I wouldn't give the same distinction to Seiko Kinetic though.

[bluedino]

We did a tour of Shinola a few years back. They almost bragged about being unprofitable.

>> Despite bringing in $124 million in annual revenue, Shinola is not yet

>> profitable. “We’re bleeding cash,” Panis admitted blithely. “It’s

>> costly to do what we’re doing. Everything is at top-of-the-line

>> quality. We’re cutting no corners.” However, Panis said Shinola has a

>> strategy for reaching profitability within the next few years, if

>> everything goes according to plan.

We had the most confusing ride home.

[Intermernet]

Just wondering how the economics of us manufacturing handles global logistics. Can a product made in the USA ship to the rest of the world at a price competitive to those made in China?

I honestly don't know the answer to this. If it's "yes", then bring on us production!

I ask because I'm in Australia, and we're a wierd case when it comes to global logistics.

[faet]

Textile manufacturing is coming back to South Carolina, USA as it's cheaper to produce in SC than in China. Along with favorable trade agreements they're able to access/use South American markets for cheaper as well.

There are fewer jobs than in the past in part due to automation.

https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/business/article91482...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/08/04/why-i...

[bluGill]

Depends very much on the product.

The more a factory produces the more automation pays off: it takes a big up front investment to pay for the machines, but once the machines are working it costs very little to make more.

Shipping has a bunch of other issues. Wars, border issues, weather, [long list skipped] all interrupt shipping, and the farther something needs to go the more likely it is one of these interrupts your shipment. Everything that depends on that is in turn disrupted.

Cars are best assembled near where they are used because when fully there is a lot of empty space (the cabin). The alternator for that car can be made pretty anywhere, it is small and dense and so shipping costs are not high. Most other products have elements of each along the way.

Large companies often have a large department dedicated to mapping out logistics. It is no easy to make sure that all the parts needed to build their widget arrive on time.

[Cthulhu_]

It depends; I believe it works really well for e.g. consumer electronics because of the value per volume, but as another commenter mentioned, not so much for cars. Car parts on the other hand are much more efficiently packaged, so for example Tesla has an assembly plant in Tilburg, NL.

[losvedir]

I'm also willing to pay a premium for American made stuff, but sometimes the price difference is extreme. Right now I'm in the market for a wood pellet smoker, and all the common, Chinese made ones (Traeger, Pit Boss, GMG, Rec Tec, etc) are in the $350-$500 range for the size I'm interested in, while all the American made ones (Yoder, MAK, Blaz'n, Royall, etc) are $1000 plus.

These things are 100-200 lb steel things, so it makes me wonder if this is what those tariffs were about, or if it's the labor, quality, or what.

Your 20% markup is one thing, but 2x or 3x the price is hard to swallow.

[adilmoujahid]

Manufacturing output in the US has more than doubled in the last 3 decades, but the number of jobs in the sector has shrunk from 17.5M to 12.4M [1]

The main reason for this is automation.

I think the right question to ask is how to make the productivity from automation benefit more the workers?

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/07/25/most-americ...

[jjoonathan]

Are these the funny numbers that use intel's massive profits multiplied by a moore's law value adjustment factor to hide the decline of everything else?

https://qz.com/1269172/the-epic-mistake-about-manufacturing-...

[dmitryminkovsky]

> Globalism has brought down prices and made many things very cheap and affordable, but at what cost?

See this oped by James Rebanks, a sheep farmer from England https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/01/opinion/an-english-sheep-...

[tonyedgecombe]

I have a little sympathy for him but not very much. Sheep farming has a terrible impact on the environment, huge areas of land where they graze are barren. It only exists due to subsidy, one of the few benefits of Brexit is we may be able to kill it off completely once out of the CAP.

A lot of the competition in the UK comes from New Zealand lamb where they have a better climate for raising sheep. It doesn't have much to do with industrial farming, it's more about their ability to grow grass year round.

[tonyedgecombe]

>Globalism has brought down prices and made many things very cheap and affordable, but at what cost?

That depends whether you consider an American job more valuable than a Chinese one. America has the wealth to provide a safety net, it's not the fault of globalism that it doesn't.

[adventured]

> America has the wealth to provide a safety net, it's not the fault of globalism that it doesn't.

The US has an enormous safety net. What are you referring to? On total net social spending, the US ranks just below France at the very top in the OECD, with 30% of all economic output directed at that. For comparison, Sweden and the UK are at 24%. For strictly public-based social spending, the US is ranked with New Zealand and just below the UK, and ahead of Canada and Australia.

On strictly public social welfare spending as a share of the economy, the US ranks in front of: Canada, Australia, Iceland, Netherlands, Israel, Switzerland, Ireland.

At the rate US public social welfare spending is increasing, it'll surpass the UK and Japan in the coming decade.

Most of the total governmental budget in the US (local, state, federal) goes to its various social programs whether entitlements or traditional welfare state spending. For one increasingly large example, the huge entitlement programs in the US involve very large welfare funds transfers to prop up the social safety nets.

Just the taxpayer funded healthcare systems for free healthcare services (mostly for the poor and disabled) in the US cost $700-$800 billion now when all levels of spending are accounted for.

$7.6 trillion in total government spending. Roughly 3/4 of that is social program spending directed at various safety nets.

The US increased its Federal budget by 9% most recently. That's something like a $330-$350 billion increase in one year, at just the Federal level. The vast majority of that is social safety net spending increases.

While most developed nations are aggressively restraining their welfare states at this point due to cost, the US continues to expand its welfare state (thus the permanent near trillion dollar budget deficits that are looming, of which ~20% is excessive military spending and ~10% is recent tax cuts (some of which resets), the rest, roughly 70%, is to fund social programs).

The myth that the US doesn't have any social safety net really needs to die given the trillions of dollars the US spends every year on it.

[LarryDarrell]

You can scream that the US spends trillions on safety nets until you are blue in the face (Or until they line us up against the wall). In reality, unless you make less than $17500 or are older than 65, you don't really feel any of it. When Americans travel or talk to Europeans they learn that our health care, college, worker protections and consumer protections are absolute shit in comparison. This leads to wanting to change the system to work for us... Not focusing on how much we already spend. If anything, the fact that we spend so much on social programs per capita is great news, because a lot of the money is already there.