At every single purchasing opportunity,
Ask for the American made product.


Shoes.

Look into your closet, how many shoes do you see in there?  How many of them were made in America?  None, I’ll bet.  It is a shame that in a country as great as America, we cannot make our own shoes. 

In the 1800’s Lynn, Massachusetts was a center of shoemaking.  Leather tanneries in nearby Peabody supplied the leather.  Originally, they were made by hand, but later in the century machinery was introduced to produce them with less labor.

As the cost of labor increased in the Northeast, the shoe industry moved farther South in search of cheaper labor.  Eventually, the industry moved offshore, and to a large degree has now found the lowest cost of labor in China.  Almost none of our shoes are made in America now.

There is a way to compete with China’s very low cost of labor – Zero Cost Labor.

WE have technology.

Imagine a robotic assembly line feeding totally automated sewing machines with laser-cut and bar-coded shoe pieces.  As the shoes come off the line, they drop into the proper boxes and automatically are fed into shipping cartons. 

The labor cost approaches ZERO.

There are many people from the aerospace and high-tech industries who are currently being underutilized and can be employed to create this high-value machinery. 

We have the raw materials.  There probably is enough leather from McDonald’s cheeseburgers alone to shoe our country.  For sneakers, we produce the synthetic materials for the soles and high-tech fabric for the uppers.

The net result is that if there was DEMAND for American made shoes, supply could easily be created utilizing the abilities that we are already good at and the resources that we already have.

One time I had the opportunity to hear Steven Jobs give a presentation at the Boston Computer Society when they were originally introducing the Macintosh computer.  His presentation showed slides of their newest technology manufacturing plant utilizing robotics and automation to manufacture computers from start to finish with very little human interaction.  If we can build complicated computers like this, we certainly should be able to build our own shoes.

The Shoe Theory can also be applied to consumer electronics, toasters, shirts, coats, and almost anything else that we can purchase at the local shopping mall. 

Rather than purchasing products that are currently made someplace else, and enriching other people with our money, we now have to learn to take care of our own. 

Keep the money here.  Employ our people.

DEMAND will create SUPPLY.