Key Points
- As shoppers await price cuts, retailers like Home Depot say their prices have stabilized and some national consumer brands have paused price increases or announced more modest ones.
- Yet some industry watchers predict deflation for food at home later this year.
- Falling prices could bring new challenges for retailers, such as pressure to drive more volume or look for ways to cover fixed costs, such as higher employee wages.
China has a lead on US manufacturing in a number of areas. I mean beyond just labor.
Apple iPhone motherboards and assembly is in China and I think everyone agrees its a very high quality phone. Its no cheap PCB either, but a relatively advanced 10+ layer board with a huge number of chips, components. With volumes that no US company can sustain.
We need to learn from China, but we also need to avoid the absolute crap / bullshit / economic failures of China while doing so.
There’s nothing to learn from China. They “learned” their manufacturing base from the US, when the wealthy leveraged trade deals to make production as cheap as possible. China has no equivalent to OSHA, doesn’t value human life or safety standards, and has weak environmental regulations in comparison to the US. The US has incredible potential especially as automation gets leveraged but we’re forever hamstrung by our bullshit economics and “line go up for shareholders” system thanks to our corrupt politicians. We have nothing to learn from China except that totalitarian states are worse than our oligarchs.
In fairness, the reason garbage comes from China’s factories is the US corporations that place orders for consumerist trash. My subtle point was, imagine if China’s “customers” valued quality over cheap production. Ever heard of Chinesium?
You ever hear of the iPhone?
You ever hear of Shenzhen? Its a city for electronics in China. Its completely different from anything available in the USA, believe me I’ve looked.
You might want to look at China again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uq_aeq2NTVE
China is incredibly automated. A ton of heavy machinery / automation is made in China. See JLCPCB youtube link above.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1IpTtRV9Sg
You think China doesn’t know how to use machines to automatically make pcb boards? Do you think a human actually was placing every single component in an iPhone?
The reason why Shenzen can create items cheaper than USA is because they have a larger volume, larger scale, more automation and superior logistics. Its time for us to learn the basics from China again. Even in China, you ain’t gonna get technicians or electrical engineers who can use these manufacturing lines at minimum wage. These are highly skilled workers, in a city full of EEs sharing knowledge and working together.
Apple chose China as a manufacturing site not because it was cheaper, but because it was higher quality and more flexible than the USA supply lines. That was over 15 years ago. People need to wake up to the manufacturing beast that China has become.
That being said, Chinese economic policy remains utter shit. So we still can pull ahead of them. But China’s out-automating us and has cheaper labor. Legions of pick-and-place machines, CNC Mills, 3d printers, pcb soldering… (enough to mass produce the iPhone) all exists in China.
Automation? China’s got more pick-and-place machines, they got more soldering ovens, they got more stencil masks than us. We need to start catching up to them.
USA has the advantage in energy though. So whatever automation we make here in the USA will be cheaper due to our cheaper energy. China still relies upon importing from Russia and other countries, while USA is largely self-sufficient for energy.
Seriously I don’t know much about Shenzhen but damn it has to be one of the most unique places on earth in terms of having such a nexus of skilled engineers, technicians and production chains for computer chips.
Yeah it is a tragedy people aren’t paid a living wage :( but if tomorrow Shenzhen just abruptly disappeared from the earth we would be in big trouble as there isn’t really “just somewhere else” where what happens at Shenzhen can happen in terms of the global production of sophisticated electronics.
Wellllll… not chips. Taiwan does that.
China / Shenzhen is more of assembly. PCB boards and the like. Very important to the computer process. China is trying to crack the chip problem as well, but they’re not quite there yet. (Taiwan, Korea, and USA are all ahead of China when it comes to chips specifically).
But chips are useless without a PCB, and China is incredibly good at PCBs / assembly. To the point where no one else aside from China can seemingly compete at this.
facepalm lol