特朗普关税下，海波因特的沙发厂只开了十个月

Bruce Krinsky opened a factory in High Point, North Carolina, to make sofas.

The factory was only open for ten months. On July 31, he closed it.

Once the factory closed, forty-five people lost their jobs.

During those ten months, he lost about three million dollars.

He and his wife started a company together, selling sofas.

At that time, the sofas were made in China, and each sold for nine hundred dollars.

Later, the US imposed very high tariffs on goods coming from China.

So he went to the Chinese factory that made his sofas.

He asked this factory to go to Vietnam and open a new factory.

The new factory was not far from Ho Chi Minh City and opened quickly.

There were one hundred and thirty workers in the factory.

One worker who made sofas was named Nguyen Van Hai.

He worked ten hours a day, six days a week.

His yearly salary was about eight thousand dollars.

He said the wages here were really high.

But not long after, the US proposed a forty-six percent tariff on goods from Vietnam.

Krinsky thought, then let's make them in the US.

He found a factory in High Point. To buy this factory, he didn't spend a single cent.

But making sofas in the US was too expensive.

In Vietnam, the materials for one sofa plus the money paid to workers came to about two hundred and eighty dollars.

Adding other costs, one sofa came to about six hundred and fifty-five dollars in total.

In High Point, materials and labor alone cost one thousand dollars.

Adding other costs, one sofa came to about one thousand two hundred and thirty dollars in total.

In Vietnam, one worker could make ten sofas a day.

In High Point, one worker could only make two or three a day.

Krinsky calculated that a sofa would have to sell for two thousand dollars just to break even.

He said that at two thousand dollars, a company like theirs would have no reason to stay in business.

As a result, he lost over one hundred dollars on every sofa he sold.

He said he had always voted for the current president.

He also asked, what exactly is an American business supposed to do?

There were other furniture factories in High Point, and they were still operating.

The person in charge of one of them was named George Jordan.

He said their sofas sold for three thousand to five thousand dollars.

If sofas sell for a high price, it's still possible to make money making them in the US.

But cheap sofas are very hard to make in the US.

The number of people in this industry was getting smaller and smaller: in 1990 there were ninety-one thousand, and now there are twenty-seven thousand.

After the factory closed, he moved more sofa production back to Vietnam.

About seventy percent of the sofas his company now sells are made in Vietnam.

Customs inspected seventeen shipments from Vietnam and demanded he pay one hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars.

Next year, tariffs on sofas from China and Vietnam will be even higher.