It will always be like this until scale ramps up and costs come down as infrastructure ramps up. China's advantage is always communicated as cheap labor but it's also the ability to almost infinitely scale production lines in a short period of time. America has mostly lost the muscle memory and tooling to do this. And that ability to scale matters with materials costs.
There are incentives that would benefit domestic producers and companies but those take time and don't make good soundbites for politicians.
The blunt tariff sledgehammer that was dropped isn't going to do it. Small experiments like the one in the article will try and mostly fail. Meanwhile producers will find loopholes and workarounds to tariffs. And the margins and viability of domestic designers and businesses will continue to weaken.
Consumers will increasingly eat the cost and lose the convenience.
There are incentives that would benefit domestic producers and companies but those take time and don't make good soundbites for politicians.
The blunt tariff sledgehammer that was dropped isn't going to do it. Small experiments like the one in the article will try and mostly fail. Meanwhile producers will find loopholes and workarounds to tariffs. And the margins and viability of domestic designers and businesses will continue to weaken.
Consumers will increasingly eat the cost and lose the convenience.