Not to pour cold water on the make-it-in-America movement, but if showerheads are any indication, it's going to be an uphill battle.
State of play: Showerhead maker Afina recently offered two versions on its site as an experiment to see how customers would respond:
A "made in Asia" version for $129.
A "made in the USA" version for $239 (to cover the extra costs of an American supply chain).
The results: 584 sales of the imported model.
Zero sales of the domestic version.
What they're saying: "I was expecting the cheaper, Made-in-Asia [version] to quote-unquote 'win.' But I was not expecting that the results were this off balance," Afina founder Ramon van Meer told NPR.
💠Nathan's thought bubble: People like the idea of buying something made in the USA unless it hurts their pocketbooks, in which case values have a peculiar way of fading away.
