Great Auk
Member
I'm going to miss affordable Nikes.
They made Nikes in the USA until the 1980s. Then they all jumped ship to the slave labor of Asia. From 2019:
"For Douglas Clark, the darkest part of working for Nike in the 1980s was watching American shoe manufacturing "evaporate" in the Northeast in a mass exodus to Asia in pursuit of cheaper labor.
"As a true Yankee — and my father was a Colonial historian — you know, it was heartbreaking," he said.
For a shoe-factory job paying $12 an hour, the actual cost of shoemaking — when adding benefits — grows to $16 an hour, compared with about $3 an hour in China, said Mike Jeppesen, head of global operations at Wolverine Worldwide, which owns brands like Merrell, Sperry and Keds. And that cost quadruples after wholesale and retail markups, he said, ballooning into a $50 price difference between a pair made in the U.S. versus in China."