“Global Sourcing”: Do You Know What You Are Getting?

These days, there is a very weak trend to buy products built in the U.S. Weak or strong, it’s somewhat laughable. Why? Because all it takes is a picture of an American flag for customers to convince themselves that the products they will be purchasing are U.S. made.  But in many instances, they are not.

Case in point: A product I saw at a public facility recently had the U.S. flag showing through the die-cut of the metal container. Proudly built in the U.S., right? Wrong. Curious about whether the product was really made in the U.S., I pulled the whole package out of the metal container. Just below the U.S. flag and the UPC code were the words, “Made in China.”

In an ideal world, our global economy would share high standards and the job would go to the best company, wherever that company builds its products. Unfortunately, the reason it matters where your products are built is that the quality standards customers depend on are frequently much lower when product is built overseas—more specifically, when product is built in China, a fact we have all seen in numerous news reports and that we have continued to study ourselves here at Carrio Cabling.

I can’t tell you how many companies I have studied that do at least some of their business overseas, while proclaiming to be “made in the U.S.A.” If you do even a little bit of investigating, you can easily discover this for yourself.

For instance, not long ago Carrio Cabling bid on a project, and won, against a number of other companies. Everything about Carrio was more competitive—our designs, our pricing, our service—and for that I am grateful.

Our new customer told us that they do not want this particular product to be built overseas, and that is why they selected all of these companies as finalists.

But I think our customer may have been misled into thinking that my competitors were going to build this product in the U.S. On the surface, I can see why they thought so. My competitors have offices in the U.S., and one of them has a picture of an American flag on its home page. But buried in their websites are words and phrases like “global sourcing,” “integrated Asian and U.S. supply chain management,” “flexibility of low-cost outsourcing,” “strategic overseas alliances,” and so on.

I could say much more about the problems I have seen firsthand with China-made products, but for now I’ll end this by saying,  “U.S. made” does not always equal U.S. made. Make sure you know what you are getting, even after you approve the first article.

Carrio Cabling Corporation builds all of its products—every time—in the U.S., at our Colorado manufacturing facility.