"This is the tuition of being able to capture your market share. The translated word, and John remembered it very well, was "tuition". But the guy says, basically, "Close your factories." (Bassett's got three factories left at the time.) "Close your three factories and let me make all of your furniture for you.". The gentleman running actually meets with them and he has this very chilly one-on-one dialogue with them that's all translated. They finally end up in this remote section of the province, almost to the border of North Korea, and they find it there. They find it after days and days of searching. They're pretending that they're looking to buy - but what they're really looking for is that one particular dresser. And he sends them off to do a secret spy mission. translator, who is a family friend, to Dalian because the stick on the back only says "Dalian, China." It doesn't say exactly which factory it's from. So he sends his son Wyatt, who is kind of his head business guy, he sends him and a. And he knows they have to be "dumping," which means selling it for less than the price of the materials. He has his engineer take it apart and deconstruct it piece by piece and price out the pieces. It's wholesaling for $100 and can't figure out how the heck able to sell it. There's a dresser that's just come on the scene in the American market and it's a Louis-Philippe dresser. On how the Bassett family tracked down a Chinese knockoff in China because desperate people were trying to steal the copper wiring to resell on the black market. If you drive down Bassett today, all of the factories - just about all the factories - have been torn down, some of them burned. If you look at Henry County alone, they basically. As they did that, the orders still kept disappearing.Īn estimated 300,000 workers lost their jobs in furniture and related industries. Actually, they cut their costs by a third to keep up with the deflation that was going on in the industry. One of the things that Bassett did was they re-engineered their furniture so that they could make it cheaper. And had won a supplier of the year award in 1999 from them, but then their orders started decreasing. Penney and they sold them $80 million worth of furniture a year. On the decline of Bassett and the rise of unemployment And then it just became this tipping point where what was once early on a blended strategy, all of a sudden then they're closing factories and making very little. It made them less competitive all around. Once they let in, once they started making it, and then once got sort of dependent on this cheaper product, that sort of made the furniture they were still making domestically. they did need some expertise on that end and it just became this slippery slope. let them in because, especially the finishing process - which is what separates a low-end from a medium- and a high-end. On Chinese managers copying the Bassett Co.'s processes and starting factories overseas in the '70s and '80sĬhinese middle managers pictures of the line and to figure out how to replicate it back at home. Macy worked for years as a reporter for the Roanoke Times, has written for national magazines and has received several national awards, including a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard. "It's better for the economy when we make things." "We haven't been on a huge growth spurt since the furniture factories started closing down ," Macy tells Fresh Air's Dave Davies. Macy says that the furniture factories were a boon to the U.S. International Trade Commission against Chinese firms and by making his own company more competitive. She profiles John Bassett III, a determined owner who fought back against the foreign onslaught - both by filing anti-dumping charges with the U.S. Journalist Beth Macy documents the collapse of the American furniture industry and its human cost in her new book, Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local, and Helped Save an American Town. The lamps, maintained by the once prosperous Bassett Furniture Co., are now funded by voluntary contributions from residents and businesses - when they can afford it.īassett is just one of many towns and cities in Virginia and North Carolina where scores of furniture-making plants have closed in the past 20 years, mostly because of competition from China and other foreign countries. In the town of Bassett in southern Virginia, some of the downtown street lights are dark. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Factory Man Subtitle How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local-and Helped Save an American Town Author Beth Macy
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |