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How much is a made-in-the-USA label worth to the typical shopper? A Texas showerhead salesman wanted to answer that question. And what he found could pour cold water on President Trump's efforts to convince more companies to build their products in the U.S. NPR's Scott Horsley has this report.
SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: Ramon van Meer (ph) is a serial salesman. He's hawked a variety of products over the years, including kitty litter that changes color when your cat might be sick and a ramp to help small dogs get up on the sofa. About a year ago, his Austin, Texas, company started selling a showerhead with a built-in filter to remove chlorine and heavy metals. So far, he says, business has been good.
RAMON VAN MEER: We sell around 25 to 35,000 showerheads a month.
HORSLEY: The showerheads are manufactured in China and Vietnam. So when President Trump imposed steep tariffs on Asian imports this spring, Van Meer decided to explore whether it made business sense to move production to the U.S. He knew it would cost more to build the product from scratch here, so he set up a little experiment. On his website, customers could already choose from a variety of finishes for their showerhead - chrome, nickel or black. Now, Van Meer added a second option - the Asian-made showerhead for $129 or a domestic model that cost about a hundred dollars more.
VAN MEER: I wanted to see how many people actually would pay for the more expensive made-in-the-USA version.
HORSLEY: The test ran for a couple of weeks and the results were not even close. Of the more than 25,000 people who visited the website and the 600 or so who bought showerheads, not a single one chose the more expensive American-made model.
VAN MEER: I was surprised and not surprised. I was expecting the cheaper made-in-Asia to, quote-unquote, "win," but I was not expecting that the results were this off balance. We sold zero made-in-the-USA versions.
HORSLEY: Maybe that's why at my neighborhood Ace Hardware store, I found more than a dozen showerheads on display, almost all of them made in China. The one exception was a low-flow model called the SaverShower. Rick Whedon's (ph) family has been making them in West Hartford, Connecticut, for nearly half a century.
RICK WHEDON: My dad designed the original SaverShower in 1976. We were shipping 2,000 showerheads a week out of here 'cause everybody wanted to save energy.
HORSLEY: Whedon told me that, along with Ace Hardware, he sells a lot of showerheads through Menards, the big Midwestern chain.
WHEDON: Menards buys from us because we had a U.S.-made product, and we were the only ones they could find. The Ace buyer told me he doesn't think consumers care at all where a product's made, and I kind of think he's right.
HORSLEY: In fact, Whedon's company makes most other models of their showerheads overseas, with the exception of that original water-saving version. It takes eight local suppliers to make the parts for that showerhead, and Whedon says they're getting harder to come by.
WHEDON: When we started this, there were 300 machine shops in Connecticut that turned brass to make parts. Today, there might be 75. There's nobody in the United States that's going to start making showerheads here, even if the tariff were 250%.
HORSLEY: I heard a similar story from David Malcolm (ph), who turned his irrigation expertise to making showerheads in California, about 15 years ago. The regional machine shop he used to buy parts from went out of business when most of their customers left the country. So Malcolm now sources parts from Taiwan.
DAVID MALCOLM: When I go to a hardware store, I - and I'll buy something that has American flag on it, and I'll look very closely at it, and it'll say, made in the USA using global components.
HORSLEY: If you really want to bring this kind of manufacturing back to the U.S., you'd have to restore the whole ecosystem of parts suppliers and skilled workers, and neither shoppers nor the president have shown the patience for that. Trump temporarily suspended his most punishing tariffs on imports from China after just over a month. Van Meer, the Texas showerhead salesman, says there's no telling what comes next.
VAN MEER: The uncertainty is really bad for business owners. What's going to happen after 90 days? Is it going to be 200%? It's going to be lower? We don't know. So it's just going to be very hard to even plan ahead longer than three months.
HORSLEY: Van Meer says he's not giving up on making showerheads in the U.S., but it's not a high priority. He's got 30 American employees on his payroll and needs to keep selling imported showerheads to keep those paychecks coming.
Scott Horsley, NPR News, Washington.
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