A typical consumer won't see the difference between a U.S.-made sofa at $2,000 and a Chinese-made sofa at $1,000. And frankly, if the margins on selling the two Chinese-made sofas are going to meet or exceed the margin on selling one U.S.-made sofa, and you'll get two or more times as many buyers at the lower price, the typical furniture store won't care. Tell them, "This one will last five years, that one twenty", and they'll probably think you're selling them snake oil. (I'll omit discussion of the nation's shift from a culture that saves to a consumer culture, but impulsiveness also plays a role - "I want it today" very often wins out over, "I'll save and buy a better one next year.")

The ready availability of cheap to inexpensive Chinese merchandise has put enormous pressure on mass market products. If you can't count on your authorized dealers to educate consumers, many of whom are brought in by "sale" signs and ads and "big red price tags", who will? A small number will educate themselves. A smaller number will chance across a dealer who really wants to sell quality items even if it lowers his revenues. But not all of them can afford a "Made in America" or "Made in Europe" premium, even if they're getting much higher quality.

Unfortunately, when you're trying to get prices close to those of Chinese imports, you have to sacrifice quality in order to preserve a decent margin - so the net effect is that a domestic manufacturer may be offering a product that's not much better than a Chinese import at a significantly higher price point. Either that, or they walk away from the middle of the market, or launch a differently branded line of Chinese imports to serve that market, while aiming their domestic product lines at the upscale market.

I find it extremely frustrating that you can now go to the hardware store and have a great deal of difficulty figuring out whether a faucet is well-made, or whether the finish on a product will start to flake off, wear off, or discolor the moment it is used. The problem of "You can't tell from the outside whether there's quality on the inside" extends far beyond furniture, and manufacturers have developed coatings and finishes that make it difficult to tell them from a higher quality product.

Having had a bad experience with a Home Depot faucet for my bathroom, some years back, I decided to bite the bullet and get a "quality" faucet. I purchased a Hans Grohe faucet through a mail order company - it was literally smashed in the mail, revealing the inside components to be almost entirely plastic beneath its stainless steel skin. That inspired me to research more deeply and I found a remarkable deal on a Bach faucet, built like a tank - brass, stainless steel and ceramic parts. Well, Bach is out of business, but you can still buy that Hans Grohe faucet. The market at work.

The net effect is that we seem to be moving into a binary market - premium goods vs. disposable goods - and I'm not sure what we can do to reestablish a range of products in the middle.