特朗普关税下，海波因特的沙发厂只开了十个月

Bruce Krinsky's sofa factory in the United States was open for only ten months before it closed.

To move sofa production from Asia back to the United States, he paid a price of about three million dollars.

The factory was located in High Point, North Carolina.

When it closed, about forty-five workers lost their jobs.

What's even more unexpected is that he originally bought this factory for zero dollars.

Krinsky and his wife Chaya founded the furniture company TOV together, initially selling sofas made in China.

The company grew fairly large, selling a sofa for nine hundred dollars.

Later, the United States imposed tariffs on Chinese goods, making it more and more expensive to source from China.

So he went to his long-term supplier Zhiwei Furniture and urged them to open a factory in Vietnam.

Last March, Zhiwei opened a new factory in Dong Nai Province, outside Ho Chi Minh City, and hired one hundred thirty workers.

Nguyen Van Hai works there doing the job of upholstering sofas.

He has to work ten hours a day, six days a week, and earns about eight thousand dollars a year.

This income is considered high in Vietnam, and he himself said this wage is 'really high.'

But just at this time, the United States proposed adding a forty-six percent tariff on Vietnamese goods.

Krinsky did the math and felt it would be better to move part of production back to the United States, so he bought the High Point factory.

Buying the factory cost not a single penny, but after starting operations, money was needed everywhere.

In the United States, the materials and labor for one sofa cost about one thousand dollars.

For the same sofa, in Vietnam it only costs two hundred eighty dollars.

Moreover, American workers can only make two or three sofas a day, while his partners in Asia can make ten a day.

He originally wanted to set the retail price at around one thousand five hundred dollars, but this price was simply impossible to achieve in the United States.

According to his calculations, a sofa would have to sell for at least two thousand dollars to break even.

In his own words, if we sell for two thousand dollars, there's no need for us to exist.

For every sofa sold, he still had to put money in.

By summer, he decided to close, saying he had voted for this president three times.

He also asked in retort, what exactly are American businesses supposed to do?

However, in High Point, there are also people who have made American manufacturing work.

George Jordan is the president of Michael Thomas Furniture Company, and his factory is small in scale.

The sofas they make sell for several thousand dollars each, and this price point can support American wages and materials.

Jordan said that wanting to push the price below two thousand dollars is indeed very difficult.

Krinsky's troubles don't stop there.

Goods sent from the Vietnamese factory to the United States were stopped by customs, and the subsequent bill was one hundred thirty-five thousand dollars.

He did not accept it and has already hired a lawyer to appeal.

After closing the American factory, about seventy percent of TOV's furniture is again produced in Vietnam.

By next January, the tariff on sofas imported from Vietnam will be raised even further.