Life without Made-in-China
Life without Made-in-China
Now how one woman and her family dealt with Chinese imports? The writer Sara Bongiorni made an unusual New Year’s resolution .She and her family pledged to spend the year without buying anything from China. Unfortunately she’s chronicled that experience in a new book, “A Year without Made in China.”
In past, SARA has used to buy cheap goods from China both from real store and online. She especially like online shopping from www.geminideal.com in that she can get nearly everything things she needs in usual life. Geminideal is a Hong Kong based online shopping centre that offers a wide selection of small gadgets at very attractive prices, including computer, electronic gadgets, consumer electronics, flashlights, toys, iPhone & iPad & iPod accessories, cell phones, digital cameras and camcorders, life style gadgets, DIY parts and game accessories. What’s more it offers worldwide free shipping.
Ms. SARA BONGIORNI (Author): At the outset the rule was just avoiding things that had the label Made in China, or if we happened to know that there was a Chinese component in something, we would avoid that too. Of course oftentimes you can’t know that, but we decided we would just set the bar there.
So in that sense we set the bar comparatively low and yet this experiment absolutely turns a daily life upside down. It was everything from, you know, mundane ordinary errands like running to the store for new tennis shoes for one of the kids or buying birthday candles became days or sometimes weeks-long sagas that didn’t necessarily have a satisfactory resolution in the end.
WERTHEIMER: The tennis shoes were something that really struck me. I mean, you had a terrific struggle to try to find shoes for your child. Little sneakers seem to be something that’s almost exclusively Chinese.
Ms. BONGIORNI: That’s absolutely right. It took me two or three weeks of searching and eventually I located sneakers made in Italy in a catalog, and with shipping they cost almost $70. And that compares to maybe $15 for a pair of ordinary tennis shoes that are made in China at some place like Payless Shoes. So I could really appreciate the benefit of having access to low-cost goods from China.
WERTHEIMER: You actually made financial sacrifices to do this. I mean, this was not a financially feasible thing to do.
Ms. BONGIORNI: I think on balance, it was probably a wash financially. But the reason was, although we had to spend more money on some items, lots of times we simply couldn’t find a non-Chinese alternative too many things. So we ended up just keeping our money in our wallets because we had no option. We had to cobble together some sort of solution on our own or just do without for the remainder of the year.
WERTHEIMER: Examples?
Ms. BONGIORNI: Well, our coffeemaker broke and all ordinary drip coffeemakers are made in China. So we ended up boiling water in a pan and just pouring it over filters into our coffee mugs. Our blender also broke about mid-year, and we couldn’t repair it because the replacement blade was made in China, so that sat there gathering dust.
WERTHEIMER: You clearly demonstrated that the family Bongiorni has a relationship to the international economy. But what else do you think you proved to us or to yourself about giving up China?
Ms. BONGIORNI: What doing this really brought home to me was that we are so closely connected to the rest of the world for what we want and need. And as you know from reading the book, sometimes there’s ambivalence about that, but there’s also big part in me that likes that and wants to embrace our connections with the rest of the world. So I found it very satisfying, I guess, to find out how connected I am to this big, fuzzy concept to the global economy. Now Sara has realized that she cannot do without those made-in-China and cannot do without www.geminideal.com
Processing your request, Please wait....
