标题: Americans Love Stories Like This: A Joe Sixpack Fight China, and Wins (Sort of) [打印本页] 作者: choi 时间: 8-31-2014 09:04 标题: Americans Love Stories Like This: A Joe Sixpack Fight China, and Wins (Sort of) 本帖最后由 choi 于 8-31-2014 09:23 编辑
Shawn Donnan, When Chinese competition threatened his business, one man refused to accept defeat. Financial Times, Aug 11, 2014 www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/f5f0cf10-1e62-11e4-9513-00144feabdc0.html
(book review on Beth Macy, Factory Man; How one furniture maker battled offshoring, stayed local — and helped save an American town. Little, Brown and Co, July 15, 2014)
Note:
(a) Average Joe
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average_Joe
(Joe Sixpack (for males))
The "sixpack" refers to canned or bottled beer in six (and abdominal muscle masses, too).
(b) The review is republished in Los Angeles Times today.
(c) "One day in November 2002, Mr Bassett, a third-generation furniture maker from Virginia, found himself in China meeting the Communist party official and businessman intent on putting him out of business."
One article ("the") in "the Communist party official and businessman" means he is an official who doubles as a businessman.
(d) "In truth, as Macy acknowledges, China did to those southern towns what they had done to Grand Rapids, Michigan just a few decades before, by paying lower wages and shamelessly turning out cheaper copies of popular furniture to grab market share."
Grand Rapids, Michigan
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Rapids,_Michigan
(on the Grand River [Lansing the capital located upstream; at 252 miles, the longest river in Michigan; empties into Lake Michigan]; sectional heading “Furniture City”: Grand Rapids remains a world leader in office furniture production, much of it now outsourced in Asia)
(e) “The US industry also had its fair share of problems and misplaced arrogance. Among them was a boozy and sexually charged business culture that leads Macy to describe its heyday as ‘Mad Men in the mountains. With moonshine instead of martinis.’"
Because the male executives were in the mountains of the South, they drank moonshines as opposed to Mad Men of Madison Avenue who drank martinis.
(f) “he [Bassett] had mobilized much of the US furniture industry and hired a top lawyer to mount a trade case against Chinese manufacturers for dumping bedroom furniture suites below cost on the US market. * * * It is also clear that there is an element of futility in fighting globalization. After punitive anti-dumping duties are levied by the US, the production of bedroom furniture does not come home to Virginia as Bassett hopes — it moves to Vietnam. And the fight is costly: One economist estimates that the legal battle ends up costing $800,000 per job saved.”