Williams-Sonoma fined $3.18M for falsely labeling products 'Made in USA'
scrippsnews.com
scrippsnews.com
Here is the 2020 order it got in trouble over originally: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2020/07/...
> the company raked in nearly $8.7 billion in sales last year.
The article did follow up the total sales number with this caveat though. It seems reasonable that the products could have accounted for more than $3.18M in sales, though we really don't know total sales of the falsely labeled products or what percent of those sales only happened due to the Made in the USA label.
We can speculate about that second question, though. Have you ever made a purchase decision based on a country-of-origin label?
I'll buy USA-made jeans from Round House for example, but it wouldn't make a difference to me if I saw a sticker in a big chain store selling jeans.
For example, it’s rare to see shoes made in the US (or other rich countries, for that matter) that are made with anything worse than mid-tier full grain leather, because what’s the point? If you use US manufacturing to make crappy bonded or corrected leather shoes, you’re just going to have the most-expensive crappy shoes on the market, so why bother?
There are exceptions, but it’s a decent signal.
"Sorry, no refunds."
I think that would avoid the fine just becoming an extra tax.
Also, its important to think of the other side of the made in the U.S.A. label which was to bring foreign manufacturers to the states for our market. Think Honda and Toyota. Getting the majority of the parts made here and the assembly here was a major benefit to those areas it affected compared to having that all happen in Japan. If you required 100% or close to it, would that have even happened?
There are both positives and negatives to the current system, but in a global market I'm not sure it's sane to expect complex products with many parts to have a single national origin.
Some engine components, some drivetrain components, all the electricals, all the suspension, and wheels are all made outside the US. That leaves the frame/body panels and some engine/drivetrain components as the only stuff sourced in the US - and yes, the engine/bike assembled in the US.
And so do Toyota and Honda for the vehicles that are made here, but even those are only a certain percentage, which allows them to say so. It's the same playing field, so I don't really think it matters. And honestly, I think most people if pressed care that it's assembled here by people here and that at least most the parts are from here, especially major parts.
Beyond that it's just corporate branding and PR, and as long as they're all playing by the same rules and people generally understand and agree with it (which I think they do, and if they don't I think if they were pressed to think about it they would come to understand fairly quickly and think it's mostly okay if presented all the facts), so I have a hard time getting thinking it's all that big of a deal, as long as the majority of U.S. sold bikes are made in the U.S. and bikes sold elsewhere are made wherever. I do think it's all a bit stupid and a big PITA, but they all do it so they're all stupid and weird in the same way.
Note: I'm not really sure why people decided to downvote you instead of engage, it's not like I think your POV on HD is invalid, just different than how I see it, so I gave you an upvote to counteract it a little. Maybe someone else can do the same. Seemed a shame to have a valid position not given any discussion.
Then again this would give foreign made products a running start (Amazon Chineseum that's 3x the cost of Aliexpress - 70% made in the US!), and it would probably be only that last 20-30% that actually resulted in domestic blue collar jobs which are the ostensible desire of such labeling.
And you would be able to produce paperwork and find experts who would value it at either, or anywhere in the middle. (since there is no market price for highly specialist circuit boards which can't be sold to anyone else).
[UK tax authority]
And thats where the fact engine ECU's are useless to anyone else comes into it - their market value can be near nil.
Seriously, tech guys think they've found magical hacks in the law and don't realize that there are literally thousands of lawyers, accountants, and investors that found the loophole first, exploited it, and then moved on to the next loophole when the legislators closed the one they were using.
The "exploit" you described was possible in the 00s. And it was closed over a decade ago.
On the other hand, if I bought a wooden spoon, or even a saucepan, and it said "Made in USA" on it, and I found out that it wasn't 100% made in the USA from materials produced here, I'd feel differently because those are relatively simple products (compared to a motorcycle) where every piece much more crucially defines the whole.
I don't know what the cutoff is, though: a product doesn't have to be 100% USA-made components, but 51% would be too little. Ballpark, 70%+ would be the over-under where I'd start to feel misled.
How about designers not in USA?
(My 2016 Mac Pro also said Made in the USA, as it was in Texas.)
[1] https://www.anomie.tech/articles/making-hardware-in-the-US/
It's very difficult being a Mechanical Engineer trying to source American parts. America just doesn't have the infrastructure for a lot of things you need. And even when it does, often you find China can do it better, faster, and cheaper. I can get a box of CNC machined parts for $10 each via 2 day DHL for a $200 shipping fee. An America shop would take just as long and charge me a couple hundred bucks for just one. And try finding some niche bearing on mcmaster-carr if you filter by USA, nearly the entire catalog disappears. A global supply chain is just the reality of mass producing machines these days. And imports can only have one Country of Origin so we can't be too detailed on the labels.
They are allowing foreign farms to label things organic without any controls or checks.
- The size is so small it is essentially meaningless to the company.
- Customers who were tricked receive nothing.
- The FTC has more play money to continue bureaucratic empire building and create more do-nothing jobs.
It seems like the fines are extremely light, and there is no real accountability. In the very least, they should be required to offer refunds to all people who bought those products.
I don't know how you'd quantify that as a function of the product's price, but they figured out a way to put a price tag on emotional damage so I'm sure someone can figute it out.
Said differently, the customer lost the freedom to support a product actually made in the US while simultaneously supporting something they didn't mean to.
More abstractly the people may have hoped to support the work of their fellow countrymen, and would instead have been undercutting them with overseas labor. That loss is not financial, but in the way the US works perhaps some monetary value could be conjured for this as well. Or perhaps that loss is considered equal to the amount they overpaid for the product.
In any case I think I’ve convinced myself that the customers should receive some financial compensation and the company should be required to clearly notify people of what they have done, to scrub any goodwill they earned that could have led to an increase in future purchases at the store.
Judging by the actual response, it's not something that rises to the level of requiring compensation, because the injury is imaginary.
After the last decade of lead contamination and other toxic products from China, I would imagine some parents are wary of a product they spend close proximity to for 10 hours every night for years.
https://www.thestreet.com/opinion/china-has-a-history-of-sel...
This is a _civil_ penalty and its the largest one to date for violating a previous order and agreement about Williams-Sonoma stopping fraudulent use of "Made in USA." More severe penalties would have ultimately required the matter to be handled directly by other government entities.
In fact the DOJ themselves could have handed out harsher penalties or pursued company executives for perjury.
The FTC did what they were able to do and instead of saying "it'd be better if the FTC had more authority and discretion in what punishes to give." you just throw snark at them and not at the political party that continually has made every government institution's teeth dull :^).
This is a joke. You may as well round that down to zero.
"More than 90% of the $392 million that the FTC returned to consumers came from cases resolved before the Supreme Court’s 2021 ruling in AMG Capital Management, LLC v. FTC, which stripped the FTC of its ability to recover redress for consumers pursuant to Section 13(b) of the FTC Act. By comparison, in the four years preceding AMG, the FTC returned more than $11 billion to consumers using its Section 13(b) authority."
Source: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/06/...
What always baffles me, is, everyone here is a consumer. You may imagine you'll one day be a business that has to deal with regulatory burden created by the FTC, but you'd still be a consumer. You can argue they're not efficient, or effective, or politically motivated, but complaining that they exist and do their congressionally mandated job is amazing to me.