US industries still hanging on
US industries still hanging on, Some domestic manufacturers are managing to survive -- and even thrive -- in a business climate dominated by overseas competition.
Housing market. For much of the 20th century, the United States dominated global manufacturing. Today, though, factories in China and elsewhere employ low-wage laborers to produce goods that sell for prices the Americans can't match.
Last year, the last plant producing flatware in the United States shut its doors, as did the nation's last sardine cannery. Recent years have seen the shuttering of America's last coat-hanger manufacturer, the last button-down-shirt maker and Empire, Nev., a company town that ceased to exist when the nation's largest sheetrock manufacturer, U.S. Gypsum, saw drywall sales evaporate following the housing bust. housing market,
Yet there are still pockets of U.S. manufacturing that have managed to thrive in the face of overseas competition. Following is a closer look at 10 survivors.
is bowling a sport. Modern bowling took off in the 1950s and quickly boomed with the invention of the automatic pin setter. By the mid-1960s, there were 12,000 bowling alleys across the United States, mostly in working-class urban centers. But that was the industry's peak.
Dogged by its blue-collar image, as well as changing social patterns, bowling declined through the 1970s and '80s. Today, only 5,800 "bowling centers" (as they are now known) remain. But even as league play continues to fade, there's some good news. The industry has refashioned itself as a family recreation and special event pastime, and the median income of bowlers has risen. is bowling a sport,
While big players like Brunswick have moved most of their bowling equipment manufacturing offshore, a Hopkinsville, Ky., company called Ebonite International is producing its own brand of bowling balls and equipment, sold under the Hammer, Columbia 300, Track and Dynothane brands.
Few products say summer like the sparkler. Cheaper Chinese imports have snuffed out all but one U.S. producer -- Diamond Sparkler of Youngstown, Ohio. sparkler injuries,
Diamond has been in Youngstown since 1985, when Phantom Fireworks operator B.J. Alan bought Chicago's Acme sparkler manufacturer and brought the operations to Ohio. Apart from a short-lived tariff-related windfall, Diamond Sparkler has never made money for B.J. Alan. The company has said it acquired the sparkler operation so that "something as American as sparklers, with (their) association with the Fourth of July," would continue to be made in America.
The disc is dead, long live the download. That's what entertainment observers have been saying since the turn of the century, and they're not wrong: Last year CD sales fell by 20% from 2009, marking the fourth consecutive annual decline.
Despite this, Sony DADC, a unit of Japan's Sony (SNE), said recently it was undertaking a $72 million expansion of its Terre Haute, Ind., manufacturing plant, where some 1,300 employees produce compact discs, Blu-ray equipment, video games and other electronics. most popular music downloads,
most popular music downloads. The disc's future looks solid for another decade or so. While you -- future-embracing consumer that you are -- may be eager to embrace on-demand downloads, Aunt Gertrude in Duluth is going to be hanging on to her CDs until the day she dies . . . and there are a heck of a lot of Aunt Gertrudes out there.
A Steinway grand piano, consisting of more than 12,000 parts, is handmade, constructed by 450 individuals over the course of a year. Other pianos may have been less grand, but in the decades between 1870 and 1930, the most expensive item in an American home was typically a piano, the must-have accoutrement in any genteel parlor. Since the advent of electronic home entertainment, though, the piano has fallen from fashion. get your child to play an instrument,
The great U.S. piano manufacturers -- Chickering and Sons, Davis & Co., J.C. Fischer and Baldwin, to name a few -- are ghosts, swept away by changing tastes and more affordable Asian-made alternatives. Just a few boutique piano-makers survive, including grand old Steinway, based in New York City's Queens borough; it is a purveyor of high-end models that retail from $50,000 to $120,000. The remaining manufacturers tend to cater to wealthy acquirers of status symbols, musical institutions and concert pianists, 98% of whom play Steinways. get your child to play an instrument,
Until a few years ago, the boosters of Fort Payne, Ala., population 14,000, billed the town as the "Sock Capital of the World." They weren't spinning a yarn: As recently as 2007, according to the Hosiery Association, when an American put on a pair of socks, the odds were 1 in 8 it was made in Fort Payne/DeKalb County.
Much of the region's workforce was employed in the town's sock mills. Today, there are only 20 mills, providing roughly 600 jobs, down from 8,000 just a decade ago, when there were six times as many mills.
The "Sock Capital" sign that greeted visitors on Interstate 59? Gone. There's a new sign, on the front door of the town's oldest hosiery mill, that hints at the industry's unraveling: "We are not hiring at this time. Thank you for coming."
socks that rock. What started unraveling the thread was the influx of cheaper hosiery from China, Pakistan and Honduras that began about a decade ago. Domestically made socks accounted for 75% of U.S. sales in 1996; that fell to 25% by 2006.
Thanks to a quirk of national politics, Fort Payne caught a break in 2005, when President George W. Bush needed a single vote to break a congressional deadlock over the Central American Free Trade Agreement. The city's congressional representative, Rep. Robert Aderholt, was opposing the bill until his single demand was met -- restore tariffs (lifted in 1984) on socks seamed in Honduras. socks that rock,
The White House complied, and the duty was restored. It did little, though, to stem the flow of hosiery from Honduras.
The fact that there's only one ironing board manufacturer left in the United States has nothing to do with the viruslike spread of tracksuits and T-shirts, and everything to do with retail consolidation and globalization.
Located in Seymour, Ind., HPI Seymour has been in business since 1942, initially as a tool and engineering shop. The company, a unit of Chicago-based Home Products International, switched to its ironing-board-only mode in the 1950s, successfully marketing a range of high-end boards to customers around the globe.
The Seymour plant, which employs 200 people (down from 400 in 2000), pumps out 720 boards an hour as it fights the trends that have buffeted so many U.S. manufacturers. Discount retailers Wal-Mart Stores (WMT) and Target (TGT) are customers, and tariffs of as much as 157% on Chinese competitors have kept the plant humming.
But with the retail chains increasingly sourcing cheaper products from Asia -- and with the tariffs coming under pressure from critics who wonder whether artificially high ironing-board costs for 7 million consumers are worth 200 jobs in Indiana -- HPI Seymour's story could be nearing an end. ironing board covers,
Without tariffs against Chinese imports, you might as well erase pencil manufacturing from the ledger of American industry.
Even after the U.S. government initiated anti-dumping action against Chinese exporters, in 1993, China's dominance of the industry here has grown. U.S. companies in 2008 produced 14% of the pencils sold in the United States, half as much as just four years earlier.
Despite the duties (running as high as 53%), American pencil-makers struggle to compete on price, especially when it comes to the familiar yellow No. 2, a schoolroom staple. Major U.S. producers, including Dixon Ticonderoga and Sanford, a unit of Newell Rubbermaid (NWL), have closed plants employing hundreds of people in recent years and shifted production to places like Mexico. pencil drawings,
Some U.S. pencil producers retreated into specialty graphite utensils, such as colored and drawing pencils. "The yellow pencil basically became a Chinese commodity," Jim Weissenborn, whose family has owned General Pencil of Jersey City, N.J., for 150 years, told Bloomberg News in June. "We've had to become a very boutique-type of business in order to survive."
New Balance is the only major player still making athletic footwear in the United States, and it is hanging on by a shoestring, as free-trade negotiations with Vietnam loom. The privately held Boston company employs 1,000 people in its five New England plants. Workers' $10-and-up hourly wages are an anomaly in an industry that imports 99% of its product.
"The company already could make more money by going overseas, and they know it," 35-year-old floor leader Scott Boulette told The Washington Post. "So we hustle."
But all the elbow grease in Norridgewock, Maine, won't keep New Balance's plant there competitive if an expected agreement with Vietnam eliminates the tariff on imported shoes, typically around 20%. The region's legislators are trying to carve out an exemption to keep New Balance's factories open. But competitors like Nike (NKE) and Reebok, a subsidiary of Germany's Adidas (ADDDF), sense an opportunity for higher profits on shoe imports -- they've banded together to fight the tariff, or "shoe tax," as they characterize it.
The U.S. footwear industry employs 12,000 people, less than half of what it did a decade ago and a fraction of the quarter-million jobs it provided in the 1950s. That makes a third-generation Norridgewock shoemaker like Michelle Witham, 40, a rarity. free trade with vietnam,
"When I started, people would say, 'Oh, you don't want to work there, they're not going to be around for long. They ain't got a chance,'" Witham told the Post. "But I've been here 20-something years now."
Struthers-Dunn is the last U.S. maker of electrical relays and controls. The company was founded in Philadelphia in 1923 and moved to South Carolina in the mid-1980s. It now specializes in building customized relays -- electrically operated switches for controlling high-powered industrial devices. Its products are used in factory automation systems, elevators, cranes, traffic controls and power generation and distribution equipment.
The privately held company was purchased and reorganized in a series of takeovers before specializing in custom-built industrial controls. investing in industrial stocks,
The rest of the industry? It's overseas, of course, concentrated in India and other Asian nations.
Sometimes globalization brings an ironic twist that actually helps U.S. manufacturers. In the case of chopsticks, it was a double dose of irony that made Americus, Ga., a center of wooden utensil production for China. how to eat with chopsticks,
how to eat with chopsticks. China produces most of the world's chopsticks, about 63 billion pairs a year. It's a simple product that serves a huge market -- a third of the world's population uses the utensil daily. But when China's several hundred manufacturers started running short of wood -- remember, that country is building furiously, and it's not heavily forested to begin with -- an opportunity arose for a U.S. company to turn the tables in international trade.
Enter Jae Lee, a Korean-American who in November 2010 founded Georgia Chopsticks to take advantage of China's shortfall and rural Georgia's abundance of wood.
Before long, the Americus plant was processing a few million chopsticks daily, slapping "Made in USA" labels on them and exporting China's favorite utensil to the Chinese. Lee is ramping up production as fast as he can.
The irony isn't lost on the workers. "Everywhere you see in America 'Made in China,'" recent hire Susan White told Voice of America," and you wonder if, in China, they ever see 'Made in America.'"
