Are you trying to "Buy American" more often?

I go for well-made over anything.

I go for cheapest price.

The catch-22 is that Americans spent so much time and money outsourcing ideas, people, jobs, and money, etc. that Americans are “dumb” in how to respond. Think about this: over 85% of the United States population is in cities where fast food joints are thriving. I bet most Americans cannot even handle an American-made shot-gun. To the point, it is a generation’s mind-set and lack of practical know-how that hampers America as a whole.

*Sorry, my stat is not based on a specific source.

I try to buy American. If not, I try to buy natural. It’s difficult for me because the town I live in thrives on Wal-Mart.

Well, I certainly don’t like to buy products from China, because of all the recalls of toys for my son. It scares me. I try to stick to natural products, which usually happen to be made in America.

(Just for the record, mine’s a Remington 1100. Made in Ilion NY.) I have been avoiding Chinese made products for at least 2 years. It is difficult but not impossible.

In regards to buying cheaper, a serious consideration at the present time, for many, would be the poor condition of the economy that America is currently faced with. Many people don’t have jobs and depend on welfare and many have jobs that pay wages so low that they can’t afford anything except for what is cheap and in cases like that, they can’t be discriminating where the product is made.

It’s nice to want to be patriotic and show your support for America, it’s products, and it’s workforce but sometimes that has to take a backseat to current circumstances. You have to do whatever you can so that you can reliably and realistically take care of you and yours as best as possible.

It kills me to think how many people took their $600 “govmint” checks and bought Chinese made TVs when their old ones still worked fine. Wouldn’t we have been better off if those checks were vouchers that could only be spent on food, meds, or American made products?

While you are making comments about China…

China 55,270. This is the number Alexa shows for Fluther’s China audience. So if you get a bad response, this could be a factor. Compare that number to Americans on Fluther.com…United States 10,544

@ponderinarf I think those stats on Fluther audience are completely wrong.

As to buying American… in recent years that has become more and more of a crap-shoot. Made in America with imported materials (lots of clothing). Made by a foreign company in the United States, by American workers (ie: Toyota, etc). Does it even mean anything useful anymore?

Here is a much more accurate site for stats.

@augustlan Ok, how do they know some of that stuff about us?

Beats the hell out of me ;-)

@essieness & @augustlan it looks like Quantcast counts the cookies Fluther.com has issued to browsers that have accessed the site.

I try to and do buy American when I can, very hard to do now though because of the “I want it cheap so I can stuff myself” mentality Americans have had for many years.

Individuals that are crying about losing their jobs to overseas producers have their houses crammed with imported stuff, a lot that could have been bought locally. One cannot cry “Buy American” if you use an imported loudspeaker system to deliver the message.

Not any more than usual. I always look for American made products as well as union made ones.

We get what we can afford. Besides, if it’s made in China, that’s ok. We borrow billions from them anyway, so we’re really just funding our own loans.

I think we are increasing our own loans not funding them . The (im)balance of trade is about $1 billion per day. China holds about 1 trillion of our dollars. We borrowed another few hundred billion to fund the Bush $600 give back and we bought more Chinese made products with it putting us further in debt.