The reasons to buy American-Made Products are real and it's not just some cliché.
According to a 2015 report by Consumer Reports, 80% of American shoppers say they prefer to buy goods made in the United States. More than 60% say they’d even be willing to pay 10% more for an American-made product. Overall, polling shows a majority of Americans hold a negative opinion towards foreign companies who ship their products into the U.S for distribution and competing with American brands, especially in industries that are already flooded with competition.
Shoppers have many different reasons for choosing American-made goods, including the following:
Jobs. The most common reason shoppers give for buying American is to help save or create jobs in the United States. According to a 2015 report from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) the U.S. lost a total of 5.7 million manufacturing jobs between 1998 and 2013 – partly because of the Great Recession, but mostly because of trade imbalances with foreign nations like China and Mexico.
A Stronger Economy. Buying American-made goods doesn’t just support the workers who make those goods. Its benefits also ripple out through the entire economy. When American companies, big and small prosper, they hire American construction firms to expand their buildings, American accounting firms to handle their money, American energy suppliers to provide them with power and American vendors for supplies, boxes, ect. The EPI estimates that every U.S. manufacturing job supports an additional 1.4 jobs in other parts of the economy.
It probably isn’t possible for everything you buy to be made in the United States. Some types of goods are harder to find than others, and sometimes you simply have to make cost and quality your top priorities. But in other cases, when it comes to a choice between two products that are fairly evenly matched in most ways, choosing the one that’s made in the U.S.A is one small way for you to support American workers and help our economy grow stronger.