A point to be made on 5 (as it pertains to manufacturing outsourcing). I've been following Ethan Allen (the furniture maker) as a short sale candidate. They now manufacture about a third of their product in China. The lead times for delivery have been getting longer and longer, mostly up to now because of bottlenecked and expensive shipping. Add input goods shortages, and you can see the problem.
Customers are getting POed, you can see some of them whining, "where's my friggin furniture?", and "last time I buy from these a holes", over on the ETH Yahoo board. In the last CC call, the CEO did suggest that they were "carefully considering" their outsourcing, seemingly suggesting they were now on hold, "comfortable with their US base". That was a month and half ago, it's gotten worse.
But, on the services, call center stuff, even engineering and product work, where all you have to do is hook someone up to a phone or computer to work, outsourcing will now quickly gut the labor forces of whole American industries. |
