I have recommended Monoprice and Bluejeans to folks before, but I am going to stop doing that. I am pretty against internet sales. People complain about Wal-mart taking jobs away from people so they can sell their inventory at lower prices, what do you think the internet sales are doing? Even the giant Wal-mart is hurt by internet sales. I am not saying that you should spend big bucks on cables from Monster or Audioquest, but maybe get your cables from Radioshack, or by the less expensive AR cables or Belkin Pure AV.
Hi; Kurt from Blue Jeans Cable here. Not to start a fight or anything, but: let me address this, because it is a view we do run into from time to time and I think there are some points to be made.
First, let me talk about taking jobs away from Americans.
We are a cable assembly house. My wife and I went into this business a few years back, and it expanded past all expectation. We now employ seven people full-time in addition to ourselves; those are American workers, making good living wages (much better than they'd be making at Wal-Mart, for whom you express some sympathy here), with health and pension benefits. All in all, that's nine American workers employed gainfully.
Do we take business from Wal-Mart? I hope we do. If we don't compete on a basis that allows us to make money, all nine of us go home unemployed and look for something else to do. "Welcome to Wal-Mart!"
Why are things cheaper on the Internet? That's a complicated question with a complicated answer. But it's not that my wife and I are vicious predators, out victimizing the helpless Wal-Marts of the world (who, by the way, sell things on the Internet, too). It has a great deal to do with things like the availability of information; the fact that a competitor is always just a couple of clicks away; the absence of expensive retail packaging; and the enormous range of choices available to the customer.
We try very hard to avoid using offshore sources. We buy most of our cable in the US, from Belden, where more American workers earning more American wages and benefits are employed. We buy so much of it, in fact, that we are beginning to be a tiny blip on their income statement--and that's a very big company.
Now, if you do decide to go with one of those high-priced made-in-China brands (or, for that matter, one of those low-priced made-in-China brands), are you helping American workers? I guess that somebody may have a job at a Wal-Mart or a Radio Shack somewhere because of cable sales, but those companies are huge "exporters" of manufacturing jobs to China. Instead of American workers manufacturing cable, and American workers connectorizing it, you've got an all-Chinese supply chain up until the product gets to the US; and then all that American workers do is unpack it from the container, ship it to stores, stock shelves and take payment.
We carry Chinese product, too; but unlike a Wal-Mart which is content to have a mega-store filled with almost nothing but Chinese goods, we actually try to employ our people in Seattle, and keep people employed in Kentucky and Indiana manufacturing our bulk cable for us. We are actually working on connectors--I have prototypes on my desk right now--that will enable us to bring HDMI cable assembly jobs to the US instead of farming all of that work out to China. We have the only HDMI cable which is actually primarily made-in-America, despite the fact that someone with a lot more money (and there are plenty of those in the AV cable business!) would have had a much easier time with the difficulties of bringing that sort of product to the market than we have. We did it because we believe wholeheartedly, deeply, in the quality and strength of American manufacturing and in keeping jobs here.
In sum: we are employing people in America to manufacture product here. We are buying as much product from American suppliers as we can find customers to sell it to. We are doing this in a market where almost nothing on any retail store shelf anywhere is made in America, so that practically every dollar of product we sell is a dollar taken out of the Chinese column and put in the U.S. column. Are we really undermining the US economy, taking jobs away from Americans? If we are, we are choosing a very odd way of going about it.
Kurt
Blue Jeans Cable
