No offense but Rainbow sandals are made in San Clemente California and are the best made sandals one can buy. Like no joke, they are as close to wearing a fully supported shoe as possible for a toe thong sandal. They will last like a high quality shoe, and far longer than the average tennis shoe or sneaker does now. I wore a pair daily for nearly ten years straight as my main shoes. Rainbow sandals have always been the educated consumer's go-to choice and are far cheaper than the junk most people buy ten times over in the same span of time.
It is not that Chinese friends are unable to make the exact same quality or better than Rainbow's. We are all the same humans. The only differences between all of us emerge from spurious nonsense of upper societal castes. Dichotomous logic implies idiocy or malevolence from both canaille or interlocutor. The Chinese are tooled to make the junk (mostly) companies and occasionally consumers-directly demand in any range of quality or compromise without concern about the ethics of the company or motivations of the individual. In other words, the Chinese do not judge you for being a stupid miser or unethical hack with your money; because the money for goods is the only relevant transaction. If you want to be exploited or buy disposable junk, those are your ethics and problem. Those that spin this narrative in a racist light are criminals. I'm just a redneck white boy from Alabama, so what do I know. Think for yourself. Do not follow the piper's music.
Do they also sell vegan shoes/sandals? Not sure I'd afford shipping to Germany, but if I tried to buy some, I couldn't since all of them seem to be made of leather
It is a rather small and very old family business. They only make and sell the one product, that I am aware of. The whole thing is in a building smaller than a typical low income house for a family of 4.
FYI, most of their sandals are made in China now because of their limited production capacity.
You have to look for the "USA" mark in the middle of the sole at their factory store for their locally made sandals. Online orders don't allow you to specify a country of origin.
In my experience running a very active pro eBay store, all you need to do is leave a note if the ordering system has such an implementation. Like even in general, a kind note with an order is such a rare pleasantry when a person sees a couple dozen orders a day and is trying their best to pack it well and keep everything sorted to send the right thing to the right place, that any kind gesture even with a request is a major positive against the monotony. It depends on who is filling orders and all. Like I ran the whole eBay thing solo, so logistics was a joke job title. Some dissonant kid will be very different in perspective. The few times I got any such kind note and request, I went out of my way in packing the item in a way that opened with presentation quality that also presented my note in reply thanking them. Implementing feature details like selecting a feature that may or may not be available at the time is too difficult to manage in the real world at this scale.
I'm sad to hear they are not doing all local production. I haven't been able to wear flip flops since my broken neck and back. I haven't been there in over a decade since, but pass by the location often. My big crash was on Coast Highway a half mile from there.
50 years of manufacturing job loss can't be fixed in one presidential term. Nicocado didn't lose all that weight in one week. Change can be hard and painful. But not changing would be giving up on the next generation. He might be rude, he might be orange, but by god he is addressing the elephant in the room everyone else is ignoring.
He's an authoritarian nut job that is destroying this country and ignoring the Constitution. He's emboldened the racists to be more open and violent. Unless you are a billionaire, he will eventually get around to destroying everything you hold dear as well. Don't think you are special.
I think tariffs ARE a solution to manufacturing being exported. Your hatred for Trump is clouding your opinion of the economics of jobs. And I imagine a lot of billionaires are less than happy with the revenue loss they are about to have with trade being down. I really doubt Trump is coming for 'everything I hold dear'. I think this country was already broken well before he was in office, so you really can't blame him for that. Whether you think DEI policies are racist is subjective- making race part of any decision making process for jobs or education is racist in my opinion. Nobody is special. I don't think he has 'emboldened the racists'. If your local police force isn't addressing violence why don't you blame them?
It's not that the stated goal is wrong, it's that the Republican Administration's methods are so terrible that they can't achieve it. Indeed the methods are so wrong that it's not even clear that the stated goal is the real goal they are pursuing.
He might be rude and orange... He might also have done all this with no plan, he might be driving up the cost of virtually everything, he might be driving many small businesses into bankruptcy, he might have created instability that's going to make everyone reluctant to start new businesses, he might have driven away all of America's trading partners, he might have handed the 21st century to China on a silver platter, he might have ended the dollar as the global reserve currency and all the perks that come with that... I could go on.
How much more damage will Republicans do to the US before enough people accept that, by and large, our manufacturing days are behind us? And that manufacturing leaving our shores is not the reason the working and middle classes are poorer than they used to be?
by and large, our manufacturing days are behind us.
I agree, but even if one were convinced that they aren't, the proper way to do it is to use your congressional majority to come up with a package of actual targeted tariffs that phase in over time and thereby incentivize investment, which you can also do by subsidizing industrial development and getting labor on your side (other than the lukewarm conditional support of UAW and only UAW).
This, though, is a stupid and angry old man desperate for a legacy, being counseled by nativists and Christian Nationalists and nothing is coherent or likely to be effective. It's tearing down the existing system that, for better or worse, people have had to build their lives around, with nothing more than "concepts of a plan" for how to replace it, and with no real intention to have anything new benefit anyone but the super-rich for whom the worst outcomes are delayed megaprojects and lowered spots on a ranked list of billionaires.
The tariffs were planned. Presidents generally roll out the 'eating your vegetables' policies in their second term. Of course its going to drive up prices, that is the point. The small business that start making domestic goods will make good money. The small businesses that just dropship crap from Temu and Alibaba will go out of business. The dollar was already disappearing as the global reserve currency before Trump.
We need to NOT accept that manufacturing is behind us. NEVER accept failure.
In a global economy there's no need to be fully self sufficient; unless, for some reason, no one wants to work with you.
If the true goal is to just bring manufacturing back to the US then a stable economy and negotiated deals with entities that are actually manufacturing things are going to go so much further than just telling the rest of the world to find new clientele among the remaining 96% of the global population because the 4% that lives in the US can no longer afford it due to artificially imposed limits.
To accomplish 1 you need to you know... have an industry to protect. The US doesn't have Coffee industry. The US doesn't have a penguin industry. The US doesn't even have a semiconductor industry. All of which were tariffed because they came up with the formula on ChatGPT.
They already had tariffs protecting things like the auto industry.
You're right that there's a real issue with globalisation
And tariffs aren't even an insane mechanism to use. But the way that the administration is using them is either a) well-intentioned but incredibly badly implemented, or b) a cynical manipulation.
The sad part is that it's likely to make it harder to change things for better in the long run. Instead of a sane plan to develop domestic manufacturing we have this chaos, and once it's over people will be wary of the very idea.
I agree that trying to bring manufacturing capability is a huge deal. Economics aside people talk about private jets polluting like crazy, well every container ship belches smoke like the fucking fire navy. And there's a lot of them
Speaking of the navy there's a concerning amount of missile components that are subcontracted to chinese companies
But all that said if I was a company and I could hold out for 4 years I wouldn't build facilities in the US. When the new admin comes in I bet they would remove tarrifs and those facilities become way less profitable
It is sad that our country's policies always change every 4-8 years or so. It is hard to chase long-term goals when politicians are only looking 4 years into the future. This is not a Trump problem but an inherent problem of our system.
There is some motive to use the stick to motivate industries - after you have shown them a carrot.
It’s like if you see a child has abusive parents, so you just drain the bank accounts of those parents, and nudge to the child “Hey, you should look for new parents”.
Look at Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. He actually encouraged growth of solar production in red states so that clean energy could actually become a profitable industry here. Once that went into full swing, THEN tariffs on Chinese panels would make sense.
Since Clinton's first term, I've been saying they need to create workers education for people whose jobs are getting shipped out. I never thought I'd bitch about neolibs, but it's their policies that manufactured this anger and populism, isn't it? 😔🫠
I don't think the next generation of the US is looking over at the Foxconn dorms and their suicide nets with envy. Even the average manufacturing job still in the US doesn't pay a living wage (due to unions being destroyed). Not that these tariffs will bring manufacturing back anyway.
They totally forgot to add the "Made In China" label on those flop-flips. Come on Chinese Embassy! If you're gonna show off your own failures and pass them off as our own, you gotta show actual US products!
I'd tell them to man up, but I don't make fun of minors or those with the mental age if a minor.
any country that invades mainland US is gonna be erased from reality. it's funny for a second until I remember how many millions of innocent deaths that would mean
Aamericans tend to over engineer, an approach which in many cases can be very desirable, but in this case would result in 1 inch thick of the heaviest rubber, with a tread, with a leather covering for entire foot, up to over the ankle, and the whole thing held together with shoelaces.
This could have been effective. Instead they chose to showcase a thing which gets manufactured everywhere in the world. Media literacy is dead, god help us.
You're the one completely missing here. This meme is ineffective because flip flops are manufactured everywhere and nobody screws them up. So what could have been a slam dunk here is more like OP slamming their forehead on the rim. Anyone who doesn't have their head up their ass or zero clue about how reality works see this and just thinks "nah that's fake" and they're correct in saying that media literacy is dead because this is getting way more genuine engagement than rock bottom low effort propaganda should get.