Wellp, I know of someone whose company proudly boasted “Made in USA” for as long as I could remember, but that suddenly and quietly disappeared. I’d been meaning to ask about that for a while, and eventually did.
Oh, what a tale of woe that was. Yeah, manufacturing prices here in the States were getting astronomical, with taxes, union wages, regulations/compliance, etc., all costing them more and more, to the point they felt that to “compete”, they had no choice but to shift some production overseas.
Everything was fine at first, but with one particular “specialty” product, once that went overseas, they started seeing exact clones of the product hit the shores before their first batch was even delivered to them!
Eventually, “competitors” started selling copies of even their not-particularly-special items.
Everything they kept in-house, were rarely if ever copied. Everything — and I mean everything — that they sent overseas, was cloned and sold back here for less, undercutting their own prices.
All sorts of NDAs and everything notwithstanding, how’re you gonna prove what you contracted out was stolen and mass-produced on the sneak? Mfr A subcontracts out to mfrs B and C, and they in turn farm out some work to mfrs D, E, and F, and so on. Each one points fingers at the other, but “nobody” is responsible/guilty of any misdeed. Death by a thousand cuts, each one denies making the fatal cut.