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How much do you think it costs to make a pair of Nike shoes in Asia?

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Re: How much do you think it costs to make a pair of Nike shoes in Asia?

#561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there was much ado about chlorinated chicken a few days ago. apparently the US washes chicken carcasses with chlorine to disinfect them, whereas that's illegal in the EU, which has more stringent farm cleanliness standards instead. I think there's similar issues with an arsenic compound (seriously!) being fed to chicken as some sort of antibiotic. iirc Trump did say he wanted EU to accept our livestock to reduce the…

"Chlorinated chicken" has been a discussion topic in Britain since before Brexit, when some politicians were saying it would be easy to get a deal with the USA to replace trade with the EU. It's not something that will be forgotten easily. British people on all sides were against reducing food standards.

IMO I think we'll end up with "a uk body setting new GMO standards" being cover to allow US GMO stuff in. Then maybe hormone beef and similar, but not chicken. Quota-less fish, tariff free trucks/cars (like that's going to make a difference) and some other minor tweaks.

Re: How much do you think it costs to make a pair of Nike shoes in Asia?

#562
post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We need to anticipate a future where China is equal to America on a per capita basis, This is a nice way to put it. Anticipate a world within your life time where China is the dominant economic, technological, military and cultural super power. Anticipate jealousy, anticipate fear, but know that as Americans who have been top dog for decades there is nothing wrong with not being the best. Additionally anticipate a c…

> cultural super power My impression is that Chinese culture has very little appeal elsewhere (at least in the West). They can't seem to be able to (or care to) package it in an appealing way. Sure, they're being catered to in films and video games but I see very little organic interest in Chinese culture, especially compared to Japanese or Korean culture.

It's true.

It's changing though. Wu Kong Black myth and even the top grossing film of last year was chinese animation. See the comments under the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsiAYjyiIBM. The film was apparently incredible.

The core culture of China is actually foundational to much of Asia. The stuff you see coming out of Japan and Korea is surface level aesthetics built on top of this foundation. You're probably thinking Nintendo, KPop and anime.

Once China makes the aesthetics just as good as other parts of Asia I can see China becoming a cultural power house. Even the mythology surrounding China historically in terms of say one thing like Wuxia is better than anything out of Korea, Japan or the west in my opinion.

Really in the end people are more attracted to the aesthetic presentation of everything. Japan does this really well while China has always been unskilled, crude and rough on the edges. But this is changing at a nearly breakneck pace.

Re: How much do you think it costs to make a pair of Nike shoes in Asia?

#563
post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fishing is less profitable for the whole UK than Warhammer. This sounded completely insane to me. I tried to look up numbers and found that Games Workshop brings in > 0.5 billion in revenue (!!), compared to all of UKs fisheries at 1 billion-ish (profit margins are, as you'd expect, pretty favorable for the plastic figurines that they don' even paint for you). Thanks for this interesting fact.

It's also worth considering that certain industries (fisheries and agriculture for instance) are subsidised. It's in our national interest to maintain production capacity, so profits are the least of our concerns. Both the UK and the EU's agricultural sectors are heavily subsidised mainly for this reason. It's cheaper to import than to produce locally, especially with our environmental standards and targets, but we n…

+1, exactly. Focusing too much in the money makes you forget about the power. At a national leadership level, there isn't much power in having a local Warhammer industry, fishing is much more strategic.

In broad terms, this is related to the error the USA made. Manufacturing in China was a very profitable deal for the USA. A lot of companies view labour first and foremost as expense, wealth as as the goal, and power in wealth— so it's not surprising as a whole the industry opted to "contract out" labour across the globe.

A lot of power lays in labour though. Money doesn't produce, invent, move, feed, etc— money is only good if someone will take it at the amounts you have it to do that specific labour you need for you.

Re: How much do you think it costs to make a pair of Nike shoes in Asia?

#564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We need to anticipate a future where China is equal to America on a per capita basis, This is a nice way to put it. Anticipate a world within your life time where China is the dominant economic, technological, military and cultural super power. Anticipate jealousy, anticipate fear, but know that as Americans who have been top dog for decades there is nothing wrong with not being the best. Additionally anticipate a c…

China is not communist in anything but name. They are an authoritarian capitalist country with social policies.

Agreed. Authoritarian is what westerners don't like. They see it as an evil.

I see it as one side of a coin. The yin to a yang.

Re: How much do you think it costs to make a pair of Nike shoes in Asia?

#565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird, the bill of rights act of 1689 is still in force. It’s literally the policy of this country to sentence white men to harsher custodial sentences with more chance of a custodial sentence than any other group, simply for the crime of being a white man. Are these the sorts of people you think should decide our rights? If the government would do what people have been voting for for decades and end mass immigration…

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Re: How much do you think it costs to make a pair of Nike shoes in Asia?

#566
post #563
post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also worth considering that certain industries (fisheries and agriculture for instance) are subsidised. It's in our national interest to maintain production capacity, so profits are the least of our concerns. Both the UK and the EU's agricultural sectors are heavily subsidised mainly for this reason. It's cheaper to import than to produce locally, especially with our environmental standards and targets, but we n…

+1, exactly. Focusing too much in the money makes you forget about the power. At a national leadership level, there isn't much power in having a local Warhammer industry, fishing is much more strategic. In broad terms, this is related to the error the USA made. Manufacturing in China was a very profitable deal for the USA. A lot of companies view labour first and foremost as expense, wealth as as the goal, and power…

This is a bit harsh: the USA didn't devalue labor in general, just manufacturing. They hired software engineers from all over the world, along with a lot of higher value engineering and product development jobs. The error the USA made was in pushing the workforce up the value chain faster than everyone could handle, and a lot of Americans got left behind.

China is moving up the value chain also, they are being forced to by their demographics, and they are investing heavily in the change ATM (just like they started investing heavily in green energy 10 years ago) so I don't think they will make the same mistake as the Americans are making right now.

Re: How much do you think it costs to make a pair of Nike shoes in Asia?

#567
post #309
post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also worth considering that certain industries (fisheries and agriculture for instance) are subsidised. It's in our national interest to maintain production capacity, so profits are the least of our concerns. Both the UK and the EU's agricultural sectors are heavily subsidised mainly for this reason. It's cheaper to import than to produce locally, especially with our environmental standards and targets, but we n…

While not disagreeing with you, I don't think we've done a great job of maintaining fisheries.

Agreed, and the same goes for most strategic sectors: energy, agriculture, animal husbandry, semiconductors, communications, space, the infrastructure to support all these, education, etc.

Re: How much do you think it costs to make a pair of Nike shoes in Asia?

#568

The thread was kind of hand wavy over the "$24* discount" for Footlocker? From the linked article... >Footlocker’s purchase price (read footnote #3) for every sale of $100 shows up as $66 in their financial reports, and not $50. In plain terms, Footlocker sells its merchandise for a 24% discount on the average. So $100 was never the sale price, just some made up, hoped for number that only appears on the shoe box, an…

>So $100 was never the sale price, just some made up, hoped for number that only appears on the shoe box, and not on anyone's financial statements. Really this should be Footlocker makes $6 on selling a $66 sneaker, for a margin of ~9%. yes. but any arguments you see in favour of onshoring manufacturing would use undiscounted list prices, so it makes sense to start from that place.

Well, Since I am close to a Shoe Palace, I just walked in and talked to the sales man. He likes selling New Balance, and the price ranges from $34 to $167, and the $167 is a discount of 33%. I talked to him long enough that the assistant manager came over, and both of the really were ashamed at shoes made in Vietnam, and Cambodia, they got it, and I told them that

https://allamerican.org/investigation/new-balance/

Re: How much do you think it costs to make a pair of Nike shoes in Asia?

#569
post #364

I hope the elites of US are not thinking about moving shoe-making back to the US because it doesn't make sense. I'm sure (I hope, actually) that some policymakers, or some researchers, have done some conclusive researches about -- give X years into the future, and let's see we do not want to disrupt the current social-economic reality too much (no revolution, no major wealth re-distribution, no world wars, etc.), whi…

The opinions of "elites" simply don't matter. There's only one guy who matters when it comes to policy now. And he's not known for his thinking abilities

You don't actually think he's making these decisions himself do you? He has advisors for these things.

Re: How much do you think it costs to make a pair of Nike shoes in Asia?

#570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's priced in a similar way to Lego.

I don't find Lego especially expensive. And Lego is way more difficult to manufacture, has very exacting functional requirements and extremely good QA.

Lego is pure IP (both from LEGO itself, and then e.g. Disney or whoever is behind the theme of a given set). If you get sets designed in China and made at the same factories that make Lego bricks, they're like 1/3 the cost. If you get sets designed in not-China but obviously ripped off ("Star World" sets that are 1:1 copies of Star Wars legos), also in the same factories, it's like 1/10 the cost.

The manufacturing isn't easy, sure, but it's more or less a solved problem and not at all reflected in the cost.

So when GP says priced like Lego, they just mean that - priced based on something completely different from the cost of materials, manufacturing, etc.

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