Boycott Chinese Goods? Get Real
Earlier today I came across the following comments on a blog post about “saving” the U.S. dollar:
Boycott chineese goods, all of our good paying jobs are being shipped over sea’s mostly to china and how do the expect us to buy anything when we have no good paying jobs beside we have nothing to sell back which weakens our currency.
Stop buying products made from China! American jobs and money is being shipped to that country everytime you purchase those cheap and substandard products.
Hey, I’m all for “Buy American” and do it whenever I can. But, the reality is that it’s darn near impossible. Don’t believe me? Back on August 19, 2007, I happened to read an article in the Chicago Tribune about a Louisiana family who tried to go without Chinese-made goods for an entire year. Sara Bongiorni of Baton Rouge came up with the idea on Christmas Day 2004 when she noticed that 25 of the 39 Christmas gifts were made in China. It was then she decided to boycott Chinese goods for the entire 2005 calendar year. She eventually went on to write a book about the experience.
The mother of three had this to say of her family’s boycott of products made in China:
It was really all-consuming… You realize the inconvenience factor was tremendous. We totally take advantage of these things from China.
When local stores didn’t have a non-Chinese product that she needed, she was forced to turn to catalogs and the Internet, which ironically didn’t make things easier, as she often had to make phone calls to see if “imported” stood for “made in China.” Customer service agents would place her on hold for an eternity as they researched the origin of products she inquired about. Even a task as simple as shopping for sneakers turned into a nightmare. Mary Ellen Podmolik, special to the Tribune, wrote:
… when Bongiorni found that her 4-year-old son had outgrown his sneakers, her hunt for a replacement pair took her to a children’s shoe chain, two department stores and a discount shoe warehouse, all to no avail.
Two weeks later and fearing that her son’s toes were starting to curl in his too-small shoes, she found a pair of Italian-made sneakers online for $68. Before ordering them- in a size one larger than he needed- she found herself running outside to get a neighbor’s opinion on whether $68 was too much to spend for children’s shoes.
Often, the family of five had to improvise to avoid buying Chinese goods. Podmolik wrote:
When they needed a mousetrap, for instance, they tried fashioning one from an empty milk jug and broken pieces of cookies and chocolate. The mouse won.
At the time the article was written, Sara Bongiorni said:
I absolutely could not do it permanently. You’d have to be able to give up a telephone and a cell phone, computers.
She noted that her family’s experiment was somewhat easier because she had small children. It would have been different, she surmised, had her kids been teenagers with their need for electronic gadgets.
So, the next time someone blurts, “Boycott Chinese goods,” you may want to tell them, “Get real.”
Source:
“A family tries 12 months without ‘Made in China’”
Mary Ellen Podmolik
Chicago Tribune, August 19, 2007
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