Chinese Christmas Decorations Imports

It is well known that the vast majority of Christmas decorations are Made in China.  There are periodic outcries of Western consumers being tired of seeing the CHINA label in nearly everything they buy.  Made in Scotland or Made in the USA become the battle cries in the media and populace for awhile until products 4 and more times the price hit the shelves.  As demonstrated by actual sales, the outcry is always short lived.  Nobody wants to pay the US equivalent of $65 for a box of 12 red glass ball Christmas ornaments.  It's just not going to happen. 

Guilt never dissuades the consumer.  They're going to buy with their pocketbook in mind.  Yet the guilt, in our humble opinion, is misplaced.  Western consumers have directly caused the dramatic increase in the standard of living all across China.  Billions and billions of dollars have transformed family life in China.  For generations of hand-to-mouth citizens, the chance to earn a paycheck, buy clothes with money, travel within China--all of these changes are the direct result of Western consumerism.

UPDATE: Of interesting note, the threat from enemy forces that began with 9/11 caused a new cautiousness in American consumerism. This caution in spending, coupled with the explosion of the internet, has driven many mom-and-pop retail gift stores out of business. The internet stores did not merely replace the brick and mortor stores. This transition actually caused a decrease in the variety of goods consumed. Let me explain: when the continental US is the marketplace, think of the US in terms of real estate. That's a ton of land that can be spotted with little retail stores, each reaching into their local community. Ten years ago, there were approximately 240,000 small retail gift shops in the US. Now think of a search engine. Nobody clicks through to page 2400 in search engine results. That's how many pages it would require to show all of those 240,000 stores (there are 10 spots per search engine results page). We commonly only use pages 1-2 to find what we're looking for. So, for any given search term, there are only around 20 pieces of real estate. So, even though there are many different search terms you could type into a search engine, each term really only offers about 20 stores that we would normally look at. So, if there are 100 search terms in a market niche, and we only use pages 1-2, that means that there are approximately 2000 points of exposure instead of 240,000. The end result is the internet actually decreases the opportunity for many stores to reach the consumer. The internet is great for the consumer, but not great for the proliferation of stores. Thus, retail buyers have decreased, thus wholesalers and importers have gone out of business, thus many Chinese factories have closed. The landscape for consumer goods, and specifically imports from China, has dramatically changed. And, while initially the internet opened up 100s of 1000s of new product options to the consumer, that same technology is actually decreasing the number of options available. Within 10 years, I predict that the internet consumer will complain that "all the stores are offering the same stuff". Why? Because the broad retail base has shrunk due to limited real estate on a search engine results page.