Doug Devine, a retired cop turned Internet retailer in Davenport, Iowa, read the morning paper Tuesday and resigned himself to removing one more item from his inventory of American-made products.
An article on Radio Flyer, the maker of red toy wagons that Devine had recently featured on his website, Homefront USA, said the company decided to move its wagon manufacturing facility from Chicago to China.
For Devine, who has been selling U.S.-made products online for three years, the announcement reminded him of his reasons for creating the site.
"I'm not naive," he said. "I understand the global economic marketplace. But I'd started asking myself: What's going to be left after a while? Are we all going to be working at McDonald's?" Ever since he launched the site, he has regularly had to remove items as manufacturers shift production facilities overseas.
Disturbed by mounting losses of domestic manufacturing jobs, entrepreneurs have set up sites that sell American-made products, hoping to profit from Americans' resentment. But as U.S. firms continue to move production facilities overseas at a rapid clip, retailers of American-made products say keeping an accurate list of inventory is harder than ever.
Part of the problem is the sheer magnitude of manufacturers moving. According to U.S. Department of Labor statistics, the nation lost more than 3 million manufacturing jobs in the last five calendar years.
Another challenge is identifying which products can truthfully be labeled "Made in the U.S.A." Because so many products assembled in the U.S. contain imported parts and materials, it's often difficult to determine country of origin, said Tom Juravich, director of the University of Massachusetts Labor Relations Research Center.
"Twenty-five years ago this would've been a relatively easy project to do because of the structure of what was at that time American manufacturing," said Juravich, whose department is developing a database of products made in the United States by unionized workers. The project is a joint effort with the union federation, AFL-CIO, which provides a search feature on its website to identify products and services made or offered by unionized workers.
At Homefront USA, Devine said he's somewhat reassured by the varied roster of companies that still maintain plants in the United States. Companies featured on the site – mainly small and medium-sized manufacturers – produce products ranging from flags to lawn furniture to Italian biscotti.
Devine says his online business has been growing slowly but steadily, with annual revenues of less than $200,000. He plans to expand the business substantially this summer, moving into a bigger office and warehouse space and launching a mail-order catalogue.
At a rival site, BuyAmerican.com, manager Don Probst also says business is growing. But while traffic is on the rise, the BuyAmerican site has had to drop some popular manufacturers, including Eastman Kodak, which recently laid off thousands of its American employees.
From BuyAmerican's remaining manufacturers, top-selling items include barbecue grills, humidifiers, Shop Vacs and molded plastic garden items. Probst also receives frequent e-mails from shoppers looking for clothing and laments that American-made apparel and consumer electronics are increasingly hard to come by.
Currently, Probst said, the site works with about 600 manufacturers, posting their products for a cut of sales. Like Homefront USA, BuyAmerican.com is a small operation by retail standards, with revenues under a half million dollars a year.
Much of the interest in U.S. products is fueled by people who believe that buying American goods helps to protect American jobs, said Robert Delgadillo, who runs USStuff.com, an information site on American-made products that he runs in his spare time.
While politicians and journalists have been hogging the airwaves for months with talk of American jobs moving overseas, Delgadillo believes people are most inclined to start seeking out American-made goods when they or someone they know has been laid off.
Matt Bates, secretary and treasurer of the AFL-CIO's union label and trade services department, said he's hoping a revamped version of his organization's products database, set to launch in the next two months, will make it easier for people to find American goods made by unionized workers. He's also planning to use the data to expand a program affixing labels on products to indicate they were made in America by union employees.
But in many cases, it's a tough call to determine if a product can be legally labeled as "Made in the U.S.A." The government's guidelines for labeling a product as such instruct manufacturers to consider where raw materials and parts come from.
But while accurate labeling is no easy task in a world where goods frequently contain components produced in multiple countries, Juravich says it's crucial to have better information about where products originate. In many cases, he believes, shoppers would be willing to spend a bit more for the assurance that the product they purchase was made by employees with decent wages and working conditions.
"What we're trying to plug into is not an old-fashioned sense of 'Buy American' or 'Buy Union,' but a more socially conscious sense of being a responsible consumer," Juravich said.
