Expect retail prices in America to go up. If you’re the shipping manager for Apple, you don’t really care because the additional costs for shipping, say, an iPhone are negligible. The added costs are not negligible, however, if you make larger items. “A 40-foot container can hold 20 sofas,” Jonathan Bass, CEO of home décor firm WhomHome, tells Gatestone. “The dramatic increase in rates — it can now cost $25,000 to ship a container across the Pacific to the East Coast — adds about $1,625 per sofa.” That increased cost puts this furniture item out-of-reach for most consumers.
Bass, a near-shoring advocate, has a fix: “Now, given shipping costs and other factors that are not temporary, it would be cheaper to makes sofas and other items in North America.”
Moving production would not only employ North Americans and bring prosperity back home, it would also mean that Americans would stop funding a hostile Chinese regime that, among other things, just labeled the U.S. an “enemy.”
Let us remember: Every single sofa that Americans buy from China gives its malicious regime the funds to grow biological weapons, dig missile silos, and develop even more means to kill Americans. So every sofa we build on this side of the Pacific helps defend the American republic.
