Damn. I saw the title, and thought there would be a Salma picture.

Tease.

The McKinsey report makes a good point, but unless I miss my guess they used a really, really terrible example. It sounds a lot like the fashion apparel company mentioned--the one that pays "well above the minimum wage" and is housed in "an old, multistory downtown brick warehouse"--is none other than American Apparel, a company whose entire brand revolves around its being a socially progressive anti-sweatshop company. So while it might well be true that logistics costs alone make it worthwhile to locate where it does, it's also true that outsourcing would be about as smart PR-wise as the AFL-CIO having an Indian-operated call-center.

Again, I'm not questioning the larger argument of the article, it just seems that, if I'm right about who this is, the example was about the worst one they could possibly have used.

Over the weekend CNN had an upstate New York manufacturer of Teak Garden furniture outline the same reasons for maintaining procuction in the US.
In a seasonal businees lead times make it impossible to ousurce prodction overseas. The owner warehouses less and maintains high standards on quality control. With good machinery and quality employees he can produce with 1 employee and a machine what it takes 5 laborers to produce offshore.

Speed counts -- yes and sometimes. Contrast the examples you give with high tech production where the value of items in inventories fall
because of deflation. But if the item has a high enough value the domestic producer-- like Dell -- are able to air freight components and
essentially eliminate the distance -time factor you were discussing.

What you are really talking about is the Dell model.. They assemble the final product close to the final customer, but essentially all of their components are produced in Asia and air freighted in.

An entire new industry of "tramp" air freighteres has come into existence to facilitate this model.

Agree with Independent George: "ed" tells you to "sex up the topic", and you respond by including a legthy quote from the McKinsey Quarterly? Yikes!

Note to "ed": why don't you suggest that Dan link to this story to "sex up" the topic of outsourcing our most important industries to Indian workers?!?

Lots of good points, but incomplete. Maybe direct labor is 3% of cost at this apparel company...so what is the rest? I'd guess:

1)Supplies (fabric)..which itself has a labor cost component..how much does the equation change when the fabric is manufactured in a low-cost area?
2)Capital equipment...when looms and sewing machines are themselves manufactured in (say) India, won't they be cheaper if installed in that region than if installed here? Those differences will show up in the "depreciation" part of the income statement.
3)Product design..speaks for itself.
4)Factory indirect labor (industrial engineers, plant general manager, supervisors, etc)..wouldn't these also be cheaper in location X?

Now if only Dell would realize what their customer support in Bangalore does to us. And SBC's DSL support as well. Yes, they speak English. But some of them don't speak it that well. Personally as a former theatre major who loves listening to accents I always found the accents of Indian English speakers to be charming and fairly understandable. But...when discussing technical issues it's quite easy to talk past one another. While helping out our company's attorney with some computer problems one time I solved the problem myself while trying to get the Dell Tier One support agent to understand what the problem was. (Dell has only brought back their support for corporate machines back to the U.S. The models bought mostly by home users and small businesses still have offshored support.) SBC's Tier One people drive me up the wall. For one thing they operate off of a script and getting them to understand that I am not their average residential customer and they should direct me immediately to Tier Two support (SBC doesn't have different departments for residential and business support.) is always fun.

Onshoring doesn't always have to involve a completely rural area, either. The difference in many costs between Silicon Valley and anything in the Kansas City metropolitan area where I live is amazing. Today I was reading an article about the difficulty faced by Bay Area companies to get the right skilled people now that their job market is recovering from its implosion. I may not be the best and the brightest by their lights but I certainly know that even the salaries they were quoted as offering wouldn't go that far with the Bay Area's cost of living compared to where I live. One story I heard from a Sprint executive I knew was that years ago when they were in full growth mode and were consolidating IT in their headquarters here they would bring people they wanted to keep here and show them a nice lakeside 2500+ square foot home and explain that yes, it did cost less than $250,000.

Jim S. That reminds me of a story from a financial management firm in San Fran that during the bubble actually paid a receptionist a salary of $100,000.

Excellent points raised in the article. It's not labor costs but technology and superior management that make the difference for most consumer companies today. In other words, supply chain management skills and technology are probably the most important source of competitive advantage for any retailer today, and this applies to a lesser degree for producers of increasingly commoditized consumer goods, be they sneakers or laptops.

Keep telling the truth, Dan.