This is one of the problems with current legislation (CAN SPAM). My understanding is that individuals don’t have standing to sue, but instead all they can do is report issues to the government and hope they do something about it.
Yep. And even worse states aren’t allowed to give individuals standing to sue either under the preemption clause (expect for in cases of deceptive advertising via email).
If you read the article this is their second offense and they settled the first for 1 million. It's just around pi, and the square root of ten is just a hair above pi. "pi" is funnier to say than "3.1 something"
Company With $8.7B in Yearly Sales Pays $3.18M Marketing Fee Covering Several Products for The Last Four Years, Will Report As "Misc Expenses" In Quarterly Report
I think in a more fair world, they should be forced to recall all falsely labeled "Made In USA" products and offer to replace them with real products made in the USA.
In a more fair world, corporations would go to jail (cease all operations for set number of years) just like the humans they share free speech rights with
See, that's the secret, because if you call them "Legal Expenses" you will definitely wind up on trial in the Supreme Court of the State of New York. Misc can cover a lot of things.
> It's interesting to question, however, if U.S.-made labels have at all contributed to the company's success.
The article did follow up the total sales number with this caveat though. It seems reasonable that the products could have accounted for more than $3.18M in sales, though we really don't know total sales of the falsely labeled products or what percent of those sales only happened due to the Made in the USA label.
I feel like that was the weakest part of the article. I don’t particularly find that to be an interesting question in this context because it’s a bit irrelevant if it works. What matters is whether they think it works, and whether it’s a worthwhile exchange for them to lie to increase sales with the hope/knowledge that it will be profitable in the long term.
MIUSA is a good marker of quality for many products—not because US workers or processes are exceptional in ways that those in poorer countries can’t be, but because US manufacturing has high labor costs, so it doesn’t make sense to cut corners that it might in other countries, because you’re already not able to chase the very-price-sensitive market.
For example, it’s rare to see shoes made in the US (or other rich countries, for that matter) that are made with anything worse than mid-tier full grain leather, because what’s the point? If you use US manufacturing to make crappy bonded or corrected leather shoes, you’re just going to have the most-expensive crappy shoes on the market, so why bother?
From William-Sonoma specifically? No, I haven't. In general, absolutely though in those instances I end up always buying from a smaller company as well that actually produces the product.
I'll buy USA-made jeans from Round House for example, but it wouldn't make a difference to me if I saw a sticker in a big chain store selling jeans.
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted for that. It was part of Walmart's early success that they sold products made in America, and there was a long time that people griped about it no longer being true. Clearly people care.
The question may have come off as implying that people do not made buying decisions based on the country of origin label. I imagine that many people’s own buying habits show them that the label does have an impact.
Since this is the second time this has happened, I kind of feel like subsequent offenses need to grow exponentially, like 3x for each new fine. That would make the next fine $9M, than $27M, then $91M etc.
I think that would avoid the fine just becoming an extra tax.
The Sapian MADE IN USA scam was even worse as it both evaded taxes and misrepresented the country of origin by shipping stuff through the Northern Mariana Islands.
Any lawyers here able to explain why the fine is negligible? Feels like a complete joke, encouraging dishonesty as the winning strategy in business. Are judges scared they'll be assassinated or something? Do we need to anonymize them?
To know if fine is disproportionately small you need to know the volume of sales of the mislabeled goods. If they sold only $500k of goods, then fine is unreasonably large, for example.
I don't know the sales volume, but this fine is for, if I read correctly, seven products. WS has roughly 15,000 products across its brands. So the fine may be in the ballpark of one year's sales, which would be about 5.5x their profit on those sales. But that assumes these products' revenue and margins are proportionate to the rest of them.
This always bugged me about Harley Davidson, because only around 70 to 80% of the parts are made in America. Most of Harley-Davidson's sold across the globe are made outside of America. Yet.. it's "Made in America" when in fact it's just assembled here. Always felt that was dishonest but IIRC they use a special loophole
Almost no vehicle manufacturers make all their own parts, and vetting the source of every part to make sure also were all made in the states would just mean that some parts are unavailable.
Also, its important to think of the other side of the made in the U.S.A. label which was to bring foreign manufacturers to the states for our market. Think Honda and Toyota. Getting the majority of the parts made here and the assembly here was a major benefit to those areas it affected compared to having that all happen in Japan. If you required 100% or close to it, would that have even happened?
There are both positives and negatives to the current system, but in a global market I'm not sure it's sane to expect complex products with many parts to have a single national origin.
To do this right you'd have to set up something like a VAT style system where each vendor in the tree specifies how much of the value of their product was produced in the US. Otherwise the obvious incentive is to import the largest subassemblies you can, with perfunctory final assembly in the US.
Then again this would give foreign made products a running start (Amazon Chineseum that's 3x the cost of Aliexpress - 70% made in the US!), and it would probably be only that last 20-30% that actually resulted in domestic blue collar jobs which are the ostensible desire of such labeling.
This is done, but it's pretty easy to game by pricing parts 'unusually'. Especially when it is a subsidary of your own company producing the parts overseas, you can decide if ECU control circuit boards are worth $1 or $1000.
And you would be able to produce paperwork and find experts who would value it at either, or anywhere in the middle. (since there is no market price for highly specialist circuit boards which can't be sold to anyone else).
I'd say there's a hard floor for the cost of board components plus the labor/management of assembling them. But yes I can imagine fraud being generally rampant. It does make you think though, now that we've got such computation and communication capabilities - if creating and publishing such kinds of reports became mandatory, such that individual consumers could benefit from a lot more analysis on what they're buying rather than the mere final price.
> For tax purposes such transactions are treated by reference to the profit that would have arisen if the transactions had been carried out under comparable conditions by independent parties.
[UK tax authority]
And thats where the fact engine ECU's are useless to anyone else comes into it - their market value can be near nil.
There are almost a dozen different ways to determine profit, and the method that results in near nil value will not be accepted.
Seriously, tech guys think they've found magical hacks in the law and don't realize that there are literally thousands of lawyers, accountants, and investors that found the loophole first, exploited it, and then moved on to the next loophole when the legislators closed the one they were using.
The "exploit" you described was possible in the 00s. And it was closed over a decade ago.
Nobody is "expecting complex products with many parts to have a single origin." And normally I'd agree that Made In the USA is diet xenophobia, but Harley specifically, and heavily, lean into being "made in the USA" - as do their owners, and certain politicians who introduced tariffs (and caused retaliatory tariffs in the EU. Which Harley sidestepped by, drumroll please...opening assembly plants in southeast Asia!)
Some engine components, some drivetrain components, all the electricals, all the suspension, and wheels are all made outside the US. That leaves the frame/body panels and some engine/drivetrain components as the only stuff sourced in the US - and yes, the engine/bike assembled in the US.
> And normally I'd agree that Made In the USA is diet xenophobia, but Harley specifically, and heavily, lean into being "made in the USA" - as do their owners
And so do Toyota and Honda for the vehicles that are made here, but even those are only a certain percentage, which allows them to say so. It's the same playing field, so I don't really think it matters. And honestly, I think most people if pressed care that it's assembled here by people here and that at least most the parts are from here, especially major parts.
Beyond that it's just corporate branding and PR, and as long as they're all playing by the same rules and people generally understand and agree with it (which I think they do, and if they don't I think if they were pressed to think about it they would come to understand fairly quickly and think it's mostly okay if presented all the facts), so I have a hard time getting thinking it's all that big of a deal, as long as the majority of U.S. sold bikes are made in the U.S. and bikes sold elsewhere are made wherever. I do think it's all a bit stupid and a big PITA, but they all do it so they're all stupid and weird in the same way.
Note: I'm not really sure why people decided to downvote you instead of engage, it's not like I think your POV on HD is invalid, just different than how I see it, so I gave you an upvote to counteract it a little. Maybe someone else can do the same. Seemed a shame to have a valid position not given any discussion.
If 4 out of 5 parts were made in the country, and the bike was assembled in the country, it does not bother me to claim the bike is made in the USA. For a complex assembly with hundreds or thousand of pieces, there's some wiggle room, and 70-80% is close enough that I wouldn't feel lied to.
On the other hand, if I bought a wooden spoon, or even a saucepan, and it said "Made in USA" on it, and I found out that it wasn't 100% made in the USA from materials produced here, I'd feel differently because those are relatively simple products (compared to a motorcycle) where every piece much more crucially defines the whole.
I don't know what the cutoff is, though: a product doesn't have to be 100% USA-made components, but 51% would be too little. Ballpark, 70%+ would be the over-under where I'd start to feel misled.
On a motorcycle? Not to me. Maybe to others. I would interpret the "made" in "made in USA" as referring specifically to the manufacturing of the physical bike.
It's very difficult being a Mechanical Engineer trying to source American parts. America just doesn't have the infrastructure for a lot of things you need. And even when it does, often you find China can do it better, faster, and cheaper. I can get a box of CNC machined parts for $10 each via 2 day DHL for a $200 shipping fee. An America shop would take just as long and charge me a couple hundred bucks for just one. And try finding some niche bearing on mcmaster-carr if you filter by USA, nearly the entire catalog disappears. A global supply chain is just the reality of mass producing machines these days. And imports can only have one Country of Origin so we can't be too detailed on the labels.
I've run into this problem trying to build hardware in the US[1]. There are certain components where it's just not possible to find them in the US. But that is as a start-up.. as a company the size of Harley, they certainly could design and commision them here if they wanted.
What part do you consider to be critical enough in the act of making you call it “made here”? Virtually nothing is wholly made in any one place. Even poetry relies on the paper and pencil industry.
A federal complaint filed by Pratum Farm of Salem, Ore., alleges a new USDA regulation unlawfully favors “foreign agribusiness,” allowing food exporters to aggregate and sell crops as “organic” though only about 2% of their suppliers are “spot checked” by certifiers.
You would think a California company would be smart and brand their products as “designed in USA” (like their Silicon Valley counterparts) and have “made in foreign country” in small print either on the box or hidden in the instruction manual
I love how instead of being mad at example #4012 about American companies profiting from fraudulent activity, you spend effort blaming the organization punishing them.
This is a _civil_ penalty and its the largest one to date for violating a previous order and agreement about Williams-Sonoma stopping fraudulent use of "Made in USA." More severe penalties would have ultimately required the matter to be handled directly by other government entities.
In fact the DOJ themselves could have handed out harsher penalties or pursued company executives for perjury.
The FTC did what they were able to do and instead of saying "it'd be better if the FTC had more authority and discretion in what punishes to give." you just throw snark at them and not at the political party that continually has made every government institution's teeth dull :^).
As a lay person, and not a lawyer, I'm not sure how this is not considered large scale fraudulent misrepresentation.
It seems like the fines are extremely light, and there is no real accountability. In the very least, they should be required to offer refunds to all people who bought those products.
28 cases resulting in $392 million returned, to 1.9 million people, with $10.4 million going to the treasury, and $6.9 million for costs.
"More than 90% of the $392 million that the FTC returned to consumers came from cases resolved before the Supreme Court’s 2021 ruling in AMG Capital Management, LLC v. FTC, which stripped the FTC of its ability to recover redress for consumers pursuant to Section 13(b) of the FTC Act. By comparison, in the four years preceding AMG, the FTC returned more than $11 billion to consumers using its Section 13(b) authority."
What always baffles me, is, everyone here is a consumer. You may imagine you'll one day be a business that has to deal with regulatory burden created by the FTC, but you'd still be a consumer. You can argue they're not efficient, or effective, or politically motivated, but complaining that they exist and do their congressionally mandated job is amazing to me.
Well it’s certainly an abstract loss, so saying “what exactly” is slightly unfair as the abstract loss cannot be exactly quantified. But probably the simplest answer is that the customers may have paid less if they knew it was not made in the USA, and so they have lost money. So perhaps a class action lawsuit will be filed. I guess loss of money is concrete enough.
More abstractly the people may have hoped to support the work of their fellow countrymen, and would instead have been undercutting them with overseas labor. That loss is not financial, but in the way the US works perhaps some monetary value could be conjured for this as well. Or perhaps that loss is considered equal to the amount they overpaid for the product.
In any case I think I’ve convinced myself that the customers should receive some financial compensation and the company should be required to clearly notify people of what they have done, to scrub any goodwill they earned that could have led to an increase in future purchases at the store.
I’ve read the comic but I’m very curious to learn more about how you feel it relates here. I guess the biggest thing I’m taking away from your comic is that maybe the people from Denmark don’t care much about some religious diet restrictions, and I’m not seeing how that relates to this story.
Well the USA is famously litigious so even if it is the same injury (which I think would require further justification) the USA is very different from Denmark on how people might be compensated for deception.
Some customers do actually make purchasing decisions to support products made in their home country. Buying a product falsely labeled as Made in the USA tricks the customer into supporting a product or business that they would otherwise have wanted to avoid supporting.
Said differently, the customer lost the freedom to support a product actually made in the US while simultaneously supporting something they didn't mean to.
The article lists a teen marketed mattress as one of the “made in USA” products actually made in china.
After the last decade of lead contamination and other toxic products from China, I would imagine some parents are wary of a product they spend close proximity to for 10 hours every night for years.
I would argue that if they bought a more expensive product because of the label "made in usa" then they lost the difference between what they would have paid for the cheaper product and what they paid for the product labelled "made in usa".
The funds and impetus to buy something that was made in America.
I don't know how you'd quantify that as a function of the product's price, but they figured out a way to put a price tag on emotional damage so I'm sure someone can figute it out.
We prosecute companies for false advertisement so why would this be any different? People sometimes buy products for a indicator that says made in the USA
So company supposedly cheated customers by mislabelling and government is collecting a huge fine, will the people who got cheated see their money back or it just goes to Uncle Sam's pocket?
It's not the first time- The Federal Trade Commission said the retailer violated a 2020 order it settled that made the same allegations.
Here is the 2020 order it got in trouble over originally: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2020/07/...
Funny, I just reported them to the FTC for not allowing me to unsubscribe from their mailing lists despite never opting in.
This is one of the problems with current legislation (CAN SPAM). My understanding is that individuals don’t have standing to sue, but instead all they can do is report issues to the government and hope they do something about it.
Yep. And even worse states aren’t allowed to give individuals standing to sue either under the preemption clause (expect for in cases of deceptive advertising via email).
Hopefully they multiply the fines by pi every time they repeat the violation. “You want to make it 10M?” in angry dad voice.
What’s special about pi? That’s just a 3x multiplier, seems more appropriate it should be an exponential fine increase to strongly deter repeat fines.
Multiplying by pi (or any number greater than one) repeatedly is exponential increase.
If you read the article this is their second offense and they settled the first for 1 million. It's just around pi, and the square root of ten is just a hair above pi. "pi" is funnier to say than "3.1 something"
Company With $8.7B in Yearly Sales Pays $3.18M Marketing Fee Covering Several Products for The Last Four Years, Will Report As "Misc Expenses" In Quarterly Report
I think in a more fair world, they should be forced to recall all falsely labeled "Made In USA" products and offer to replace them with real products made in the USA.
In a more fair world, corporations would go to jail (cease all operations for set number of years) just like the humans they share free speech rights with
See, that's the secret, because if you call them "Legal Expenses" you will definitely wind up on trial in the Supreme Court of the State of New York. Misc can cover a lot of things.
Rule of Acquisition #239 - Never be afraid to mislabel a product.
My god it's actually a real one, kudos
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Rules_of_Acquisition
Especially when any fine will be merely a rap on the knuckles. From the article:
> the company raked in nearly $8.7 billion in sales last year.
> It's interesting to question, however, if U.S.-made labels have at all contributed to the company's success.
The article did follow up the total sales number with this caveat though. It seems reasonable that the products could have accounted for more than $3.18M in sales, though we really don't know total sales of the falsely labeled products or what percent of those sales only happened due to the Made in the USA label.
I feel like that was the weakest part of the article. I don’t particularly find that to be an interesting question in this context because it’s a bit irrelevant if it works. What matters is whether they think it works, and whether it’s a worthwhile exchange for them to lie to increase sales with the hope/knowledge that it will be profitable in the long term.
> we really don't know total sales of the falsely labeled products or what percent of those sales only happened due to the Made in the USA label.
We can speculate about that second question, though. Have you ever made a purchase decision based on a country-of-origin label?
Personally I will spend significantly more to buy made in America.
MIUSA is a good marker of quality for many products—not because US workers or processes are exceptional in ways that those in poorer countries can’t be, but because US manufacturing has high labor costs, so it doesn’t make sense to cut corners that it might in other countries, because you’re already not able to chase the very-price-sensitive market.
For example, it’s rare to see shoes made in the US (or other rich countries, for that matter) that are made with anything worse than mid-tier full grain leather, because what’s the point? If you use US manufacturing to make crappy bonded or corrected leather shoes, you’re just going to have the most-expensive crappy shoes on the market, so why bother?
There are exceptions, but it’s a decent signal.
From William-Sonoma specifically? No, I haven't. In general, absolutely though in those instances I end up always buying from a smaller company as well that actually produces the product.
I'll buy USA-made jeans from Round House for example, but it wouldn't make a difference to me if I saw a sticker in a big chain store selling jeans.
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted for that. It was part of Walmart's early success that they sold products made in America, and there was a long time that people griped about it no longer being true. Clearly people care.
The question may have come off as implying that people do not made buying decisions based on the country of origin label. I imagine that many people’s own buying habits show them that the label does have an impact.
I took it the opposite way (that it implied they do make decisions based on that info) but I guess it could be interpreted either way.
Fines should be proportional to income sheet and balance sheet, or they fail to have a deterrence effect or may violate the 8th a.
I'm always amused by the meme image that fused "low quality copper ingots" with "virgin vs chad". https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/042/283/f27...
"Sorry, no refunds."
Since this is the second time this has happened, I kind of feel like subsequent offenses need to grow exponentially, like 3x for each new fine. That would make the next fine $9M, than $27M, then $91M etc.
I think that would avoid the fine just becoming an extra tax.
I think even the first offense should be all associated revenues plus a punitive fine on top of that. This current fine is nothing.
It sounds like they made a good investment on that order of MADE IN USA labels.
The Sapian MADE IN USA scam was even worse as it both evaded taxes and misrepresented the country of origin by shipping stuff through the Northern Mariana Islands.
https://www.bmwe.org/journal/1999/09SEP/b04.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Abramoff_CNMI_scandal
Any lawyers here able to explain why the fine is negligible? Feels like a complete joke, encouraging dishonesty as the winning strategy in business. Are judges scared they'll be assassinated or something? Do we need to anonymize them?
To know if fine is disproportionately small you need to know the volume of sales of the mislabeled goods. If they sold only $500k of goods, then fine is unreasonably large, for example.
I don't know the sales volume, but this fine is for, if I read correctly, seven products. WS has roughly 15,000 products across its brands. So the fine may be in the ballpark of one year's sales, which would be about 5.5x their profit on those sales. But that assumes these products' revenue and margins are proportionate to the rest of them.
Also, the damage to the brand is almost certainly greater than the fine.
This always bugged me about Harley Davidson, because only around 70 to 80% of the parts are made in America. Most of Harley-Davidson's sold across the globe are made outside of America. Yet.. it's "Made in America" when in fact it's just assembled here. Always felt that was dishonest but IIRC they use a special loophole
Almost no vehicle manufacturers make all their own parts, and vetting the source of every part to make sure also were all made in the states would just mean that some parts are unavailable.
Also, its important to think of the other side of the made in the U.S.A. label which was to bring foreign manufacturers to the states for our market. Think Honda and Toyota. Getting the majority of the parts made here and the assembly here was a major benefit to those areas it affected compared to having that all happen in Japan. If you required 100% or close to it, would that have even happened?
There are both positives and negatives to the current system, but in a global market I'm not sure it's sane to expect complex products with many parts to have a single national origin.
To do this right you'd have to set up something like a VAT style system where each vendor in the tree specifies how much of the value of their product was produced in the US. Otherwise the obvious incentive is to import the largest subassemblies you can, with perfunctory final assembly in the US.
Then again this would give foreign made products a running start (Amazon Chineseum that's 3x the cost of Aliexpress - 70% made in the US!), and it would probably be only that last 20-30% that actually resulted in domestic blue collar jobs which are the ostensible desire of such labeling.
This is done, but it's pretty easy to game by pricing parts 'unusually'. Especially when it is a subsidary of your own company producing the parts overseas, you can decide if ECU control circuit boards are worth $1 or $1000.
And you would be able to produce paperwork and find experts who would value it at either, or anywhere in the middle. (since there is no market price for highly specialist circuit boards which can't be sold to anyone else).
I'd say there's a hard floor for the cost of board components plus the labor/management of assembling them. But yes I can imagine fraud being generally rampant. It does make you think though, now that we've got such computation and communication capabilities - if creating and publishing such kinds of reports became mandatory, such that individual consumers could benefit from a lot more analysis on what they're buying rather than the mere final price.
No, you can't. This is governed by transfer pricing laws. Tax authorities can and will assess penalties for behavior like that.
> For tax purposes such transactions are treated by reference to the profit that would have arisen if the transactions had been carried out under comparable conditions by independent parties.
[UK tax authority]
And thats where the fact engine ECU's are useless to anyone else comes into it - their market value can be near nil.
There are almost a dozen different ways to determine profit, and the method that results in near nil value will not be accepted.
Seriously, tech guys think they've found magical hacks in the law and don't realize that there are literally thousands of lawyers, accountants, and investors that found the loophole first, exploited it, and then moved on to the next loophole when the legislators closed the one they were using.
The "exploit" you described was possible in the 00s. And it was closed over a decade ago.
Nobody is "expecting complex products with many parts to have a single origin." And normally I'd agree that Made In the USA is diet xenophobia, but Harley specifically, and heavily, lean into being "made in the USA" - as do their owners, and certain politicians who introduced tariffs (and caused retaliatory tariffs in the EU. Which Harley sidestepped by, drumroll please...opening assembly plants in southeast Asia!)
Some engine components, some drivetrain components, all the electricals, all the suspension, and wheels are all made outside the US. That leaves the frame/body panels and some engine/drivetrain components as the only stuff sourced in the US - and yes, the engine/bike assembled in the US.
> And normally I'd agree that Made In the USA is diet xenophobia, but Harley specifically, and heavily, lean into being "made in the USA" - as do their owners
And so do Toyota and Honda for the vehicles that are made here, but even those are only a certain percentage, which allows them to say so. It's the same playing field, so I don't really think it matters. And honestly, I think most people if pressed care that it's assembled here by people here and that at least most the parts are from here, especially major parts.
Beyond that it's just corporate branding and PR, and as long as they're all playing by the same rules and people generally understand and agree with it (which I think they do, and if they don't I think if they were pressed to think about it they would come to understand fairly quickly and think it's mostly okay if presented all the facts), so I have a hard time getting thinking it's all that big of a deal, as long as the majority of U.S. sold bikes are made in the U.S. and bikes sold elsewhere are made wherever. I do think it's all a bit stupid and a big PITA, but they all do it so they're all stupid and weird in the same way.
Note: I'm not really sure why people decided to downvote you instead of engage, it's not like I think your POV on HD is invalid, just different than how I see it, so I gave you an upvote to counteract it a little. Maybe someone else can do the same. Seemed a shame to have a valid position not given any discussion.
If 4 out of 5 parts were made in the country, and the bike was assembled in the country, it does not bother me to claim the bike is made in the USA. For a complex assembly with hundreds or thousand of pieces, there's some wiggle room, and 70-80% is close enough that I wouldn't feel lied to.
On the other hand, if I bought a wooden spoon, or even a saucepan, and it said "Made in USA" on it, and I found out that it wasn't 100% made in the USA from materials produced here, I'd feel differently because those are relatively simple products (compared to a motorcycle) where every piece much more crucially defines the whole.
I don't know what the cutoff is, though: a product doesn't have to be 100% USA-made components, but 51% would be too little. Ballpark, 70%+ would be the over-under where I'd start to feel misled.
Does it count as made in USA if said HD motorcycle has software, made, in, India?
How about designers not in USA?
On a motorcycle? Not to me. Maybe to others. I would interpret the "made" in "made in USA" as referring specifically to the manufacturing of the physical bike.
That reminds me of Apple's "Designed in California" on some products.
(My 2016 Mac Pro also said Made in the USA, as it was in Texas.)
Are any brands better? Looks like the only car squeaking over 80% is Tesla on this big table https://kogod.american.edu/autoindex/2023
It's very difficult being a Mechanical Engineer trying to source American parts. America just doesn't have the infrastructure for a lot of things you need. And even when it does, often you find China can do it better, faster, and cheaper. I can get a box of CNC machined parts for $10 each via 2 day DHL for a $200 shipping fee. An America shop would take just as long and charge me a couple hundred bucks for just one. And try finding some niche bearing on mcmaster-carr if you filter by USA, nearly the entire catalog disappears. A global supply chain is just the reality of mass producing machines these days. And imports can only have one Country of Origin so we can't be too detailed on the labels.
I guess it depends on what you mean by “made”
I've run into this problem trying to build hardware in the US[1]. There are certain components where it's just not possible to find them in the US. But that is as a start-up.. as a company the size of Harley, they certainly could design and commision them here if they wanted.
[1] https://www.anomie.tech/articles/making-hardware-in-the-US/
The easy fix for this is to use a nutrition style labeling for origin. Just list the origin of each part. Problem solved.
Easy? Maybe it seems that way if you know nothing whatsoever about American politics.
What part do you consider to be critical enough in the act of making you call it “made here”? Virtually nothing is wholly made in any one place. Even poetry relies on the paper and pencil industry.
Reminds me of the case a farmer is bringing against USDA on the USDA organic label.
They are allowing foreign farms to label things organic without any controls or checks.
Can you recall the case name? I'd like to read it!
A federal complaint filed by Pratum Farm of Salem, Ore., alleges a new USDA regulation unlawfully favors “foreign agribusiness,” allowing food exporters to aggregate and sell crops as “organic” though only about 2% of their suppliers are “spot checked” by certifiers.
Why is this not criminal fraud? If you or I did it, we'd be prosecuted.
My guess: going after them civil courts has lower burden of proof and/or FTC can't go after people criminally and has to refer cases to the DOJ.
You would think a California company would be smart and brand their products as “designed in USA” (like their Silicon Valley counterparts) and have “made in foreign country” in small print either on the box or hidden in the instruction manual
Laser engraved in 0.5 pt font on white plastic.
Cool, so to summarize the fine:
- The size is so small it is essentially meaningless to the company.
- Customers who were tricked receive nothing.
- The FTC has more play money to continue bureaucratic empire building and create more do-nothing jobs.
I love how instead of being mad at example #4012 about American companies profiting from fraudulent activity, you spend effort blaming the organization punishing them.
This is a _civil_ penalty and its the largest one to date for violating a previous order and agreement about Williams-Sonoma stopping fraudulent use of "Made in USA." More severe penalties would have ultimately required the matter to be handled directly by other government entities.
In fact the DOJ themselves could have handed out harsher penalties or pursued company executives for perjury.
The FTC did what they were able to do and instead of saying "it'd be better if the FTC had more authority and discretion in what punishes to give." you just throw snark at them and not at the political party that continually has made every government institution's teeth dull :^).
If the FTC is this impotent and toothless, why do they even exist?
They're both to blame, which I'm sure GP would've clarified if you had asked them. Stop seeing in false dichotomies.
Only about half of everyone believes both sides are bad. This puts the average somewhere in the correct direction, at least.
As a lay person, and not a lawyer, I'm not sure how this is not considered large scale fraudulent misrepresentation.
It seems like the fines are extremely light, and there is no real accountability. In the very least, they should be required to offer refunds to all people who bought those products.
Do FTC fines go to the FTC budget?
Pure FUD.
https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/recent-ftc-cases-resulting-r...
28 cases resulted in payments in 2022.
This is a joke. You may as well round that down to zero.
28 cases resulting in $392 million returned, to 1.9 million people, with $10.4 million going to the treasury, and $6.9 million for costs.
"More than 90% of the $392 million that the FTC returned to consumers came from cases resolved before the Supreme Court’s 2021 ruling in AMG Capital Management, LLC v. FTC, which stripped the FTC of its ability to recover redress for consumers pursuant to Section 13(b) of the FTC Act. By comparison, in the four years preceding AMG, the FTC returned more than $11 billion to consumers using its Section 13(b) authority."
Source: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/06/...
What always baffles me, is, everyone here is a consumer. You may imagine you'll one day be a business that has to deal with regulatory burden created by the FTC, but you'd still be a consumer. You can argue they're not efficient, or effective, or politically motivated, but complaining that they exist and do their congressionally mandated job is amazing to me.
What exactly have customers lost by buying something that wasn’t actually made in America?
Well it’s certainly an abstract loss, so saying “what exactly” is slightly unfair as the abstract loss cannot be exactly quantified. But probably the simplest answer is that the customers may have paid less if they knew it was not made in the USA, and so they have lost money. So perhaps a class action lawsuit will be filed. I guess loss of money is concrete enough.
More abstractly the people may have hoped to support the work of their fellow countrymen, and would instead have been undercutting them with overseas labor. That loss is not financial, but in the way the US works perhaps some monetary value could be conjured for this as well. Or perhaps that loss is considered equal to the amount they overpaid for the product.
In any case I think I’ve convinced myself that the customers should receive some financial compensation and the company should be required to clearly notify people of what they have done, to scrub any goodwill they earned that could have led to an increase in future purchases at the store.
https://satwcomic.com/my-little-pony
I’ve read the comic but I’m very curious to learn more about how you feel it relates here. I guess the biggest thing I’m taking away from your comic is that maybe the people from Denmark don’t care much about some religious diet restrictions, and I’m not seeing how that relates to this story.
Learning that what you thought was beef was in fact pork and horse is the same injury as learning that what you thought was Made in the U.S.A. wasn't.
Judging by the actual response, it's not something that rises to the level of requiring compensation, because the injury is imaginary.
Well the USA is famously litigious so even if it is the same injury (which I think would require further justification) the USA is very different from Denmark on how people might be compensated for deception.
Some customers do actually make purchasing decisions to support products made in their home country. Buying a product falsely labeled as Made in the USA tricks the customer into supporting a product or business that they would otherwise have wanted to avoid supporting.
Said differently, the customer lost the freedom to support a product actually made in the US while simultaneously supporting something they didn't mean to.
The article lists a teen marketed mattress as one of the “made in USA” products actually made in china.
After the last decade of lead contamination and other toxic products from China, I would imagine some parents are wary of a product they spend close proximity to for 10 hours every night for years.
https://www.thestreet.com/opinion/china-has-a-history-of-sel...
What do companies gain by pretending that their product is made in America?
Many people in the US will pay more for a product made in the US. I'm one of these people.
I would argue that if they bought a more expensive product because of the label "made in usa" then they lost the difference between what they would have paid for the cheaper product and what they paid for the product labelled "made in usa".
The funds and impetus to buy something that was made in America.
I don't know how you'd quantify that as a function of the product's price, but they figured out a way to put a price tag on emotional damage so I'm sure someone can figute it out.
It's called fraud. That word used to mean something.
We prosecute companies for false advertisement so why would this be any different? People sometimes buy products for a indicator that says made in the USA
Faith in the system
[flagged]
A USA made product
jobs
So company supposedly cheated customers by mislabelling and government is collecting a huge fine, will the people who got cheated see their money back or it just goes to Uncle Sam's pocket?
It goes back to customers: https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/recent-ftc-cases-resulting-r...
What do you mean supposedly? They absolutely cheated customers.
We need to legislate that any fines like this go back to customers instead of government /s