Harbor Freight: Closer To The Future Than William Gibson

Or, The Five Stages Of Branding Grief

“compare this picture to one by Snap-On, which costs 11 times as much”

One of my free subscribers noted last week that he didn’t want to support my lifestyle, so I hope he doesn’t get too agitated by reading the following humblebrag: I have spent thousands of dollars at the Harbor Freight in Lexington, Ohio over the past six months. By “thousands” I mean “probably between two and three thousand”, the way people who say they are “earning six figures” are invariably salaried at $103,250 or something like that, but still. That’s the proverbial shit-ton of money when you spend it $19.95 at a time, you know.

If you’ve read me for any length of time, you know that I am essentially obsessed with MADE IN THE USA. I’ll pay almost any price and bear almost any burden to get something made locally; failing that, I’ll buy Canadian, then European, then Japanese. My new house has American-made anything and everything I can get, from the garage doors (easy enough) to the refrigerator (don’t get me started). So how did I become such a Harbor Freight addict that I’m now part of their stupid “Inside Track Club”? Why is there a “DAYTONA” long-reach floor jack on the shop floor right next to my USA-made Snap-On aluminum racing jack? Isn’t this about as hypocritical as “Fat Brad” Brownell, the “founder” of Sadwood Radwood, spending a decade whining about capitalists on a more-or-less daily basis then using an unearned windfall to IMMEDIATELY become a fourth-rate wanna-be Cleveland slum lord, with no more shame in the process than a dog displays while licking its own rectum?

Yes and no, dear reader. I’m a devoted Harbor Freight customer for two reasons. The first is that Harbor Freight simply executes better than their big-box competitors, way out here in Nowheresville. Better stock, better layout, more helpful people. The second would be familiar to any cyberpunk reader: Harbor Freight is living in the future. Don’t worry; I’ll explain, with what I hope is a bare minimum of pop sociology and just a touch of history, covered quickly in the few (okay, several) paragraphs ahead.

It all began with what are called maker’s marks, carved or stamped into individually produced items as far back as Ancient Egypt. In an era where almost everything was the product of an individual, it was useful to know who had made what. Over time, this idea was extended to products of guilds or, as in the case of the sword below, entire cities known for excellence of one sort or another:

perhaps the pommel looks bigger when it’s in a pair of dainty hands

“Me Fecit Soligen”, or “I was made in Solingen”. As you might imagine, maker’s marks of this sort were widely counterfeited pretty much from their beginning, but this was perhaps less of a concern in a pre-mass-production era where goods rarely traveled long distances before reaching their end user and virtually everything was scarce, permanently so.

Most marketing textbooks like to conflate maker’s marks with brands, but in truth there was always a difference. Brands connoted ownership, not creation. Animals were branded. Slaves were branded. Swords had a maker’s mark. The two ideas didn’t unite until the Industrial Revolution, which unleashed a torrent of affordable products into the average home, usually shipped from somewhere far away .

These products needed to be identified, of course. At first they were largely “branded” with the name of the man or family who owned the factory in question, but once European law started to encourage the formation of corporations for purposes besides shipping and fishing those corporations wanted to put their names on products as well.

There was a vanishingly brief era in human history, no more than 120 years, when branding more or less told you who made something and maybe even where it was made. Example for my Gen BM-X friends: “Ashtabula” one-piece steel cranks were once made, unsurprisingly, in Ashtabula, Ohio. There were exceptions from the beginning, of course. Sears Roebuck and the other catalog stores “rebranded” and “house branded” things on a regular basis; the “Sears Tele-Games” was just an Atari 2600, and the house-brand “heavy sixer” console of that name with lead bottom plate and burlwood trim is perhaps the most sought-after of VCS systems.

In general, however, you could depend on the idea that your refrigerator, or angle grinder, or video game console was made by the company whose name graced the label. When Bill Clinton renewed China’s “most favored nation” trade status, however, right around the time that NAFTA also went into effect, everything about branding and manufacturing in this country changed. Seemingly overnight, the vast majority of factories moved overseas. What was once made in Toledo was now made in Shenzhen, and so on. The famous bridge in New Jersey that reads

TRENTON MAKES - THE WORLD TAKES

became a joke. Now Trenton is a place where containers arrive from China, full of products that have been branded with the names of American corporations.

The Oral History, to use a Dune trope in reference of conventional wisdom, tells us that “off-shoring” was done to save money. Well, that’s true, but it wouldn’t have been enough of a reason on its own. The real reason you move your manufacturing to China is to shift the balance of power within your company.

By modern standards, an American manufacturer of, say, 1960 was awfully “lean”. The vast majority of the employees were actively involved in the production of whatever the company sold; they were the iceberg bulk of the payroll. Management, marketing, design, engineering — that was all just the tiny piece above the water. Unsurprisingly, these companies were almost all unionized, and their blue-collar staff had a remarkable amount of say in how the company was run. They were also essentially impossible to control or even discipline, to the point that supposedly one out of three Fords leaving the assembly line during the Vietnam era was deliberately sabotaged in one way or another.

Off-shoring changed all that. It allowed companies to fire their iceberg bulk and replace it with a contract. No longer did you need to fear: strikes, go-slows, sabotage, fat union benefits, continually increasing pay. You just bought your product from some faceless Chinese person — and if that person couldn’t deliver, you chose another one, simple as that.

A better era of men would have been dismayed that their Chinese junk product was essentially the same as the competition’s Chinese junk product — but the MBA class loved that, because it allowed them to differentiate via marketing and social media and social justice and a million other forms of pure idiocy that had nothing to do with their products’ actual merits. All of a sudden, the iceberg bulk was above the water, filled to bursting with human resources employees, diversity counselors, empowered girlbosses of inclusion, and a thousand other types of employee who contribute nothing but friction and waste to the bottom line.

Combine that with some pretty outrageous currency manipulation on the part of both the Chinese and American governments over the past thirty years, and it became obvious that cost of goods sold, or COGS, long a critical part of corporate accounting, almost didn’t matter! You were paying pennies on the dollar compared to local manufacturing, and the price could stay the same! You could use all that extra profit to swell the company ranks with worthless human trash!

Fifty cents of every dollar you spend on an Apple iPhone has nothing to do with the product, which is delivered as an engineered and assembled unit from China. It’s spent on the ads, and the marketing, and the activism, and a hundred other activities that probably represent a net degradation of our country and culture. In fact, if you had enough political clout to make it work, you could start a company called “Orange” that bought unbranded iPhones from Foxconn, the actual maker of iPhones, and sold them for ten percent over cost via the Internet, for a transaction price a full 45% below than of an iPhone.

“Orange” would be no more or less of a real brand than Apple; the “Designed in California” you always see on Apple products is a hand-wave similar to the “all-new Ford Ranger” that was sold in Thailand for 9 years prior to coming here. I used to know a fellow who did prototyping for iPhone cases in the Pacific Northwest then taught the Chinese CNC crew how to program their machines; as far as I know, that sort of thing was sent to China years ago, all the better to keep the Apple campus filled with rage-filled blue-haired hippos and suchlike.

What would the ethics be of purchasing an “Orange” phone? I’d say they would be at worst equal to the ethics of buying an iPhone, and likely superior to said ethics. After all, pretty much one hundred percent of your iPhone purchase price goes to people who have a rabid hatred for the American flag and everything for which it stands. It’s just that half of those people are in China and half are in California. If you could take 40 percent of that pie and spend it elsewhere, you’d be well justified in doing so.

Wait, but doesn’t Apple have a right to your business, since they own the brand and the idea? I would suggest that off-shoring production amounts to an implicit surrender of said rights. The minute you think your product doesn’t deserve to be made in country where your mirror-glass offices are located, you’ve become nothing but an importer. You’re basically Malcolm Bricklin. If Zastava had fired Bricklin and hired someone else to bring in the Yugo, who among us would have shed a tear for him? The iPhone is a Foxconn product, imported and branded by Apple. That’s all.

Which brings us, at the 1600-word mark, to Harbor Freight. To walk into a Harbor Freight is to be confronted with a panoply of made-up brands. Pittsburgh. Bauer. U.S. General. You’ll search in vain for the headquarters, social media, or diversity justice activism of these brands, because they have no existence other than as a name to slap on products made in China and Taiwan by companies with actual names you likely can neither read nor pronounce. Harbor Freight maintains a Sloan-style ladder of brands across their palm sanders and rotary hammers and ratchet wrenches. After a while you’ll figure out which ones are “good”, but if you can’t there’s some signage to let you know the Bauer pneumatic nailer is better than the Pittsburgh.

When I began my experiment in hobby farming, I spent hours per item trying to find American sources for the tools and materials I needed. What I learned is that there are tools for which there is an American or European source, such as wood staplers (Arrow, for SOME) and angle grinders (Metabo!), and there are tools with no such sources. In the case of the former, I grit my teeth and spend the extra money, but in the case of the latter…

Consider, if you will, small electric random orbital sanders, highly useful if you’re trying to fix a horrifying paintjob on a Radical PR6. Milwaukee Tool has a good one for $129, while “Bauer” at Harbor Freight offers an identical-looking product for $59. They’re both made in China. From what I can tell, they might be made by the same factory. Which doesn’t mean they’re of equal quality; anyone who has ever had a product made in Taiwan, for example, knows that materials and build quality are almost like a slider you can move to adjust a character in a video game, depending on what you pay the factory. But they are awfully similar.

If Milwaukee made the sander in the USA, I’d pay double. But I’m not interested in paying double to have a different fake brand on the sander. Is Milwaukee Tool a real company that makes things in the USA? They are, sometimes. In the case of random orbitals, however, they’re as fake a brand as “Bauer”. Therefore, the ethical thing for me to do is to save sixty dollars on the Chinese sander and spend that money on something American-made, if I can manage it.

A long time ago, on a website far, far away, I made the argument that people who degrade the standards in a profession or industry have no right to demand that said degradation stop with them. If you’re a male YouTube clown who makes trash car videos, thus taking eyeballs from reputable and informed reviews, you have no right to complain when the viewers decide they’d rather see the same trash reviews — but done by a pretty girl instead. If you spent ten years lowering the standard of writing and testing at Car and Driver, you have little room to complain that another outlet is doing an even worse job and stealing your idiot “eyeballs” in the process.

Similarly, if Milwaukee Tool wants to send their orbital sander business over to some anonymous Chinese factory, why shouldn’t I do the same, and save 50% of the purchase price in the process? That’s the whole rationale behind the existence of Harbor Freight. It’s as cyberpunk as anything in Neuromancer: the idea of a brand has become so worthless, so fungible, that we no longer need to take it seriously. In the universe of Harbor Freight, the same factory might make all the belt sanders, or there might be different factories for “Bauer” and “Pittsburgh”, or — and this is what I find most interesting — you might see two different factories that each make both of the sanders. There’s precedent for that, as any Japanese guitar aficionado will tell you.

In that respect, the future is much like the past — specifically, the past of Sears-catalog America. Back then, distribution mattered much more than brand. Anything Sears put in their catalog would sell much better than anything Sears didn’t put in the catalog. The prestige of your brand mattered little, because nobody was going to take the time to start a snail-mail correspondence with you about your superior-branded product when they could just buy whatever Sears has.

In the heyday of Mad Men advertising, brand took temporary precedence over distribution. If one store in the mall had Polo shirts and the other had Izod, that would determine the store you chose. But that was just a blip in history. In the future you’ll choose your distribution channel, be it Amazon or Harbor Freight or Lowe’s or Wal-Mart, and your product choices will be a consequence of that.

There’s a way for companies — brands — to break this cycle, of course. They can choose to make first-rate products in the United States, cut zero corners, and market aggressively to the people who care. Done skillfully, that gets you American Giant. Done incompetently, it gets you SK Tools, who are currently suffering through the indignities of recent Chinese ownership despite the fact that their USA-made ratchet box wrenches were basically without peer. Either way, you gotta be Sixties-style lean, you have to treat manufacturing seriously, and you need to get your message out. Most of all, you have to hire leadership who have the requisite moral courage to stay the course.

William Gibson likes to say that “The future is already here; it’s just not very evenly distributed.” I’ve been observing the tools, the brands, used by the trades who built my house. As you’d expect, there’s a lot of decades-old American stuff involved, immortal Sawzalls and whatnot. When it comes to recent-production tools, however, the names “Pittsburgh” and “Icon” seem in just as much evidence as “DeWalt” or “Milwaukee”. Faced with a future of burning through disposable hardware, the trades are making the obvious choice to cut out the middleman.

From that, I suspect that every Chinese rebrander in this country will eventually go through the Five Stages of Branding Grief:

Denial that people don’t seem as interested in paying 2x the price for your ancient American brand on modern Chinesium.

Anger on the part of your white-collar staff: how is racism and Trump responsible?

Bargaining, in which you cut the price again and again, or maybe hire a TikTok star or something.

Depression, the economic kind, where you lay off all the remaining engineers and product quality inspectors while hiring additional blue-hairs to police the use of pronouns in your office.

Acceptance, where you sell the brand to Harbor Freight or Amazon so they can use it on a line of toilet roll holders.

Don’t expect me to cry a single tear for you during this process. If you want to make things here, I’ll spend money I don’t have on them, I’ll harangue my friendships into dust on your behalf, I’ll become a “collector” of things I don’t need. But if you want to just put a name you bought on junk you’ve also bought, well… in the words of my free subscriber, I don’t think I want to support your lifestyle any more.