Welcome back to Raleigh! Fall break is now officially over, and hopefully everyone has remembered to make the trip back here to N.C. State. For many students, fall break offers one of the only times to visit home during the fall semester. Fall break can be a wonderful and much appreciated chance to see loved ones and friends, but it can also make an in-state student realize the differences between Raleigh and wherever he or she calls home.
For me, I noticed the economic disparities between Raleigh and my hometown right outside of Charlotte when I went home. Disparities caused by jobs leaving the country to take advantage of cheap labor. Raleigh has become a bustling center for technology and science, with development and opportunity growing in the area at an amazing pace. However my hometown, Mount Holly, has taken a very different route, with jobs leaving the area and many corporations being forced to shut down due to competition from overseas.
As students at a school founded on the principals of hard work and labor in the areas of manufacturing and agriculture, we need to realize what competition from overseas does to our local economy. Sure, it means that we can all buy a shirt at Wal-Mart for $4.99, but when you stop to think about how this pricing affects our hometowns and the hometowns of people on the other side of the world, you may come away with a different picture of competition. Don’t get me wrong, industry moving to other parts of the world raises the quality of life of the people working in the factories overseas, but we need to seriously weigh the costs as well as the benefits of such changes.
It’s not just textiles either, as many industries that have been prominent in North Carolina are leaving due to competition from other markets. Furniture, agriculture, fishing and many other jobs are leaving our state because we aren’t competitive with people that make a tenth of what we do per hour.
A large part of the problem is our high standard of living and pay rates. But, another problem can be addressed by our insistence of having extremely cheap products. What happened to the willingness to pay for quality? What happened to pride in products that lasted longer than a week? It’s time we think about buying American products again. It’s time we stop throwing out our hometowns when we throw away an overseas product rather than replacing and fixing a hometown product.
Raleigh has a lot going for it and with time, all of North Carolina will be able to call itself a very advanced state with great research and science opportunities outside the Triangle. For now, take a look at your hometown and see if you can tell what has been done by competition from overseas.
If it frustrates you, like it does me, that the industry your town was once known for has now left, maybe you’ll begin to think more about the products you buy and where they are made. So, the next time you go shopping take a moment and check where it’s made, and if it isn’t America just think about what you are saying to your country and hometown.
Are you planning to buy American products? E-mail and tell us at [email protected].
