BENTONVILLE, Ark. — With brisket costing $3.49 per pound in Lahaina, Hawaii, Rob Wheeler said he can’t stand to waste even the smallest scrap.
That need for precision and efficiency led Wheeler, owner of a Maui-based restaurant and catering company, to invent a barbecue tool he calls the Qwick Trim brisket trimmer, which he said makes it easier to cut thick layers of fat off of several types of meat.
Instead of using a kitchen knife to cut into the meat, Wheeler’s invention places a surgical-grade blade between two guards and below a handle, similar to the design of a hand-held cheese cutter, allowing the user to move the blade away from his or her exposed hand.
“The meat’s natural texture is a little bit different than fat,” Wheeler said. “So the blade won’t really get into the meat a lot; it wants to skip off of it. So just naturally by that blade going through and getting close to the meat, it stops and there’s a little bit of resistance.”
Wheeler was making his pitch last week during the fourth Wal-Mart Stores Inc. U.S. Manufacturing Supplier Summit. For the past three years that event has included an “open call,” where small business owners, inventors and entrepreneurs such as Wheeler present their goods in hopes of getting those products on the shelves of the nation’s largest retailer, which has more than 5,000 U.S. stores and thousands more worldwide.
The only hitch is that the products have to be made in the United States.
Clay Hoyt, an associate buyer for Wal-Mart who sat in on Wheeler’s presentation, said he was impressed.
“They (customers) are going to see this and they’re going to freak out because, very simple, it solves a common problem. I can only imagine that this is going to just slide off (shelves) like crazy.”
While the first part of the presentation was open, it was only a matter of minutes before the buyer closed it to negotiate specifics with Wheeler, such as Wal-Mart’s proposal, price points, product volume and more.
Wheeler is selling the Qwick Trim online for $23.95. It launched about a month ago and he said he has already sold 1,000 units.
1 million new jobs?
Wal-Mart officials have said the manufacturing summit and open call are part of an initiative — “Investing in American Jobs” — it launched in 2013, when it pledged to purchase $250 billion worth of products made, grown or sourced in the United States by the year 2023. The initiative was three-pronged: Buy more goods from U.S. manufacturers that already have a relationship with Wal-Mart, find and support U.S. manufacturers who are new to Wal-Mart, and bring back manufacturing jobs that had shifted overseas.
Wal-Mart also said when it announced its initiative that the $250 billion investment could create up to 1 million new jobs in the United States.
“We know that this matters,” Michelle Gloeckler, a Wal-Mart vice president and U.S. manufacturing lead, said during an address to summit attendees last week. “Not only to our business — because making goods closest to where they’re consumed is good for business — but it matters to our customers. So I’m pleased to report that we are right on plan. We’ve had thousands of suppliers selling their American-made products on our shelves and on walmart.com.”
Last year, Consumer Reports magazine found that eight of every 10 shoppers would prefer an American-made product over one that is imported, and six of every 10 shoppers said they would be willing to pay at least 10 percent more for American-made goods, citing such reasons as helping the U.S. economy or because they believe that American-made goods are superior.
Cindy Marsiglio, Wal-Mart’s vice president of U.S. manufacturing, estimated that half of the products pitched at previous open call events wound up on store shelves in some capacity. And almost every product presented at this year’s event will be made available on walmart.com.
“I continue to be impressed by the companies and their items that they bring to the customer, and that they’re making them here in the USA,” Marsiglio said.
Among the success stories that Wal-Mart cites are:
• Hanna’s Candles. “As part of our U.S. manufacturing effort, Wal-Mart is making a renewed commitment to Hanna’s Candles. Our goal with Hanna’s is to go from roughly $4 million in 2012 to $30 million in 2013 and $45 million by 2017. That has created jobs in Arkansas,” the retailer says on its website.
President and CEO Burt Hanna said this past week his company is so busy that it has had trouble finding enough employees. He said the company’s partnership with Wal-Mart has created “at least” 60 jobs at its Fayetteville plant, where all its production takes place.
• Kent Bicycles, according to Wal-Mart, “moved its production from overseas to Manning, South Carolina. According to Kent, when at full capacity in 2016, they will have added at least 175 jobs and will be assembling 1 million bikes annually. Wal-Mart stores began selling the bikes in January of 2015.”
Scott Kamler, president of Kent Bicycles, said they have moved “some” production back to the United States, and are making 1,300 bikes a day, or 474,500 per year, in South Carolina, out of 3 million they are manufacturing annually. The rest of the company’s production takes place in China. He said they have created about 90 jobs so far in South Carolina.
Truth in Advertising?
But critics of Wal-Mart are skeptical. They say the retailer, in an effort to keep prices low, has driven jobs out of the country to places where wages are lower and working conditions are sometimes more severe, and that the company also has misrepresented as American-made products that were actually made overseas.
According to a study by Robert Scott, of the Economic Policy Institute, Wal-Mart accounted for approximately 11.2 percent of American imports from China between 2001 and 2013. The study, released in 2015, says the company added $36.7 billion to the United States’ trade deficit with China in the same time frame.
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According to Scott, Wal-Mart’s trade deficit with China is equivalent to the loss of 314,500 jobs during that period, which were jobs that would have provided higher wages and better benefits. He also argued that 100 American jobs have been displaced for every actual or promised job created by Wal-Mart’s 2013 initiative.
The Economic Policy Institute, based in Washington, D.C., receives a little more than a quarter of its funding from labor unions, according to its website. Unions have long been at odds with Wal-Mart over many of its policies and attempts to organize the retailer’s employees.
Wal-Mart officials discounted the EPI’s research in a statement emailed to the Globe, calling it “an old report with flawed economic analysis that assumes that imports equal job losses and (it) does not take into consideration that countless jobs are added through the global supply chain, distribution and logistics, among other areas of the business.”
Scott called the fact that importing goods could support such ancillary jobs “irrelevant.”
“Their claim is even more vacuous than it appears at first glance,” he said. “All products have to be distributed, all products have to be marketed, whether they are produced domestically or abroad. If a TV set is made in Texas and shipped to a Wal-Mart store in Chicago, you’re still going to go through warehouses and distribution centers the same way as if it was made in China.
“Those are not net jobs created. The same number of jobs are created whether they’re produced domestically or imported,” he added.
The other criticism has come about because of allegations of mislabeling as American-made products that were made outside the country and overseas.
Last summer, Truth in Advertising, which identifies itself as a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization, conducted an investigation that “uncovered more than 100 instances of false and deceptive U.S.-origin representations. The investigation revealed products labeled ‘Made in the USA’ though packaging indicated they were ‘Made in China.'”
The investigation also found some USA-product labels at walmart.com that were in direct conflict with the site’s own information on the same webpage.
Last fall, the Federal Trade Commission sent a letter to Wal-Mart officials, following a review that turned up “discrepancies or outdated information regarding country-of-origin claims on the walmart.com website,” and expressed concerns about the “clarity and conspicuousness of disclosures on ‘Made in USA’ logos used in conjunction with Wal-Mart’s Investing in American Jobs Program.”
Wal-Mart followed up with a number of actions, according to the FTC, including removing “Made in USA” logos from all product listings on its website, and implementing a policy to flag and remove U.S.-origin claims in advertising copy submitted by suppliers, and took other steps as well.
“These claims are not new, and as we’ve said all along, we will continue to work with our suppliers to help ensure we are giving our customers the transparency and authenticity they are looking for,” the company said in a statement.
Jet Moody, press secretary for the Alliance for American Manufacturing, said his organization has two main complaints with Wal-Mart’s initiative, one being that it doesn’t go far enough.
Moody said that while AAM appreciates Wal-Mart’s commitment to spend $250 billion on U.S.-made products over a period of 10 years, she cited the company’s annual revenues of almost $500 billion to suggest the retailer could do more.
“When you look at it and put it in perspective … I do have to question their efforts,” she said. “Is it just a PR thing or are they really trying to impact American manufacturing? We applaud the efforts, but when you look at the perspective, what is the real commitment?”
Moody said the Alliance, which identifies itself as a nonprofit think tank created by some of the United States’ leading manufacturers and the United Steelworkers in 2007, also takes issue with the percentage of its products Wal-Mart imports. Despite the promise to spend $250 billion on U.S.-made products beginning in 2013, Wal-Mart has increased imports in every year since, and led the nation in imports each year from 2013-15, according to the Journal of Commerce.
“Wal-Mart holds the summit every year, they have great publicity, all these things surrounding these summits,” Moody said. “But at the end of the day, for an organization that large and that influential, what is the real impact?”
Wal-Mart, in its statement to the Globe after the summit and open call event, reiterated that it is proud of its investment.
“Yesterday, we were able to give hundreds of businesses with U.S.-made products an opportunity to land their items on walmart.com. It’s just another way we can give our customers great products while also supporting our commitment to purchase an additional $250 billion in products that support American jobs.”
‘Reshoring effort’
While Wheeler was pitching his new brisket cutter, Darius Mir, CEO of Made in America Seating, attended the summit hoping Wal-Mart could help his 34-year-old business increase its volume.
Mir’s company uses three manufacturing plants: one in California, a second in China and the newest plant, which opened about two years ago in Union City, Tennessee.
“That is our reshoring effort,” Mir said. “We are trying to bring manufacturing back to the United States. And for that, we put together a very extensive factory, a fairly large investment of just above $40 million in very high-tech equipment, vertical integration, sophisticated management systems and, of course, a very talented American workforce who will make all this work for us.”
Made in America Seating supplies office chairs to 1,300 furniture dealers in the United States. Mir said his company is hoping to prove products manufactured in the United States can compete with imported products based on price and quality.
“The most important factor for us is the opportunity to bring manufacturing back to the United States and to encourage talented American workers to work with us and take ownership of what they’re doing,” Mir said.
