My wife is expected to bring our first son into the world any day now so as you can image the past few months have been filled with lots of baby shopping. Being a marketer I look at store displays, ads, labels and even materials while shopping and I can’t help but notice how many of our products come with “Made In China” branding. I’m from the Pacific Northwest, a place known for good seafood. Where I grew up there was a shallow creek that you could catch salmon bare-handed. A few days ago I was preparing a fillet of salmon for my wife and as I’m reading the packaging I notice that my salmon is a “Product of China”. That’s extreme, I thought to myself. I’m living in California and with my home state of Washington a hop way and here I am eating salmon from China.

It seems to me that some executives do not have a good understanding of long-term profitability. It’ll take me just a few more sentences and a simply diagram to sum it up. In grade-school we all learned about the cycle of life. That same cycle applies to the flow of money in any community. The flow can’t just go one-way or the resource will eventually dry-up. Buying locally is vitally important to a healthy community. It keeps resources in the place of consumption so that it can be recycled. If the resource is consumed in American and then transferred to China’s cycle then it is not recycled and it cannot be reused. If it is not recycled then it will eventually be transferred completely to a place that does not benefit the community or nation in the long-run. In short; if the resources leave the community that support the company then eventually the company will cease to exist because the community will no longer have the resources to support it. If we’re displacing a penny every time a dollar is cycled through the community then after a hundred revolutions we won’t have anything left. This analogy is missing other variables that make that dollar last a little bit longer but you get the picture.