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You may have read things like Why Amazon Can't Make A Kindle In the USA, but what about a hand tool with no electronics, just a few materials, large tolerances, and a simple assembly process? The same problem of manufacturing engineering being exported for greater integration with manufacturing labor applies to that, too - according to this, American "tool and die" capabilities for small-scale manufacturing are gutted. (I suspect the this video overstates the problem, because the biggest obstacle came when the non-manufacturing engineer with a small budget wanted to contract out a specific need - molds for plastic injection molding, which the molder would have sourced from the PRC - and two other engineers lent their expertise for two different ways of manufacturing plastic injection molds, and he found a mold-maker, after he needed to change the material of a part, but it's still a big deal that there aren't more American vendors advertising these capabilities.) And the video didn't even touch the materials supply chain...
(The completed grill scrubber was priced at $75 and the initial batch sold out within hours, in case you were wondering.)
If you haven't read things like that Forbes series, you might not fully appreciate that it's very easy to have a false perception of what the manufacturing capabilities of other countries are, due to selection bias in exports; there's often a wide variety in the quality of goods produced in a given country and only a narrow range of quality that's economical for you to import. One famous example is the brand images of German cars in America, which only imports expensive German cars. Less famously, there's been a secular trend of American imports of Japanese musical instruments going from the bottom to the top of the Japanese (followed by other Asian countries') production ranges and many American musicians assume each decade's imports were a representative sample. But, since manufacturing labels reflect final assembly, increasingly complicated supply chains are mostly invisible to the consumer. It'd be interesting to know what this partnership would have done differently, if they had expanded their searches to Mexican and Canadian suppliers as an acceptable alternative to American suppliers (as a larger-scale business intent on "friend/near-shoring" would), but the value of purism vs general applicability is a "six of one, half a dozen of the other" type thing.
As someone who's pro-industrial policy and also anti-CCP, I think think the supply chain problem is one of those issues with a lot of misplaced attention, wherein globalization gets projected onto various political narratives, to the detriment of analyzing capability.
(Hopefully that's enough of a conversation-starter, without crossing into CW!)
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Notes -
An inspiring video, but it's still hard to square the fact that a US-made stick of metal and plastic sells for fully 1/6 the price of a Nintendo Switch 2. The grill scrubber looks like solid product, but if I put 6 of them together, I don't think I'd have even close to the value of a new portable game console.
I get that that is an apples-to-oranges comparison, and maybe I don't have a good baseline appreciation for the cost of strong metal things compared to complex electronics. I've paid almost as much as the scrubber for a glorified chunk of construction material before, but I was not happy about it.
It's just that if I saw that on the shelf next to the $15 wire scrubbers, I'd assume it was motorized. If that's what it's going to take to bring back manufacturing to the US, I question whether the general public is willing to pay for it.
Reality has a surprising amount of detail. A musical greeting card (open card, plays tune) has a bill of materials of like 30 discrete components.
When you look at something and say "surely this part is done by a machine and not by humans" stop and consider that no maybe this is actually still produced by a human.
I thought The Hardware Hacker by bunnie, while a bit dated by now, had a fascinating tour of Chinese electronics fabrication.
The Nintendo Switch 2 probably doesn't have humans soldering individual components to boards and instead uses more automated surface mount tech, but I presume there's still a lot of manual bullshit involved. You probably don't just have trucks backing up to the factory and dumping raw parts on one end and on the other end out pop Switches.
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