[HN Gopher] Sharpie found a way to make pens more cheaply by man...
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Sharpie found a way to make pens more cheaply by manufacturing them
in the U.S.
https://www.wsj.com/business/sharpie-us-production-cost-cutt...
https://archive.ph/hdUzo
Author : impish9208
Score : 95 points
Date : 2025-10-05 10:01 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
| impish9208 wrote:
| Gift link: https://www.wsj.com/business/sharpie-us-production-
| cost-cutt...
| eqvinox wrote:
| Great, now the few insular successes of manufacturing in the U.S.
| will be trotted out as support for deranged economic policies :(.
| bediger4000 wrote:
| I can't decide if that's the same, or different from, trotting
| out the very few tariff-boosting economists in support of
| deranged economic policies.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Tariffs are an inefficient tax on consumption. If the parties
| keep failing to agree to figure out how to increase revenue,
| this is the best stop gap we could hope for. Especially if it
| generates over $1T.
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/19/economy/us-tariff-rebate-chec...
| lovich wrote:
| Why are you implying that the goal is to increase revenue?
| This admin also pushed for tax cuts simultaneously and the
| budget they passed added to the deficit again.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Tariffs at their current rate canceled the deficit added by
| the tax cuts according to experts.
| lovich wrote:
| What experts that are not part of this administration? He
| fired people who gave him numbers he didn't like already
| like the head of BLS so I don't trust any numbers self
| reported by them.
|
| And oh, is this also with that made up math they used to
| say that continuing the existing tax cuts past their
| expiration date didn't count as increasing the deficit?
| schainks wrote:
| You're joking, right? Show me the money.
| timerol wrote:
| https://www.bestmoney.com/tax-relief/learn-more/how-
| trump-ta... is more of a personal finance website, but it
| reports (from the Tax Foundation), over a 10 year
| timeframe, a $3.8T total deficit increase over previous
| law. (CBO estimates are less favorable on deficit
| increases.) The same article estimates $2.1T in tariff
| revenue based on policy in early September.
|
| Seems closer to plugging half the gap than "cancelled"
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Yes, Trump got 17 trillion dollars. _pinkie_
| themafia wrote:
| The economy that you and I experience? Or just the economy that
| Wall Street experiences?
| nialse wrote:
| It is hard to discern if this is an uplifting story, or a rather
| depressing story about regaining lost basic manufacturing process
| skills. Any and all countries should be able to make basic and
| essential things.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Anytime humans create systems that allow a group of individuals
| to orchestrate a higher energy output of productive activity,
| it's an uplifting story because it's literally how wealth is
| generated for society.
| walls wrote:
| Unless all of that new wealth is captured and horded by a
| handful of people.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| This rarely happens 100%, as you see in the article the
| employees make more when they enable higher energy
| efficiency.
| themafia wrote:
| The corollary is that it rarely happens that 100% of the
| earned gains goes to those who actually earned them. If
| there was actual competition for their labor then that
| would change.
| bgwalter wrote:
| Newell Brands stock price fell sharply during the first Trump
| administration from $53 and is now at $5.40.
|
| Marketing this as a success story of U.S. manufacturing is
| insane. If the WSJ honestly thinks the outlook is better now, it
| should at least provide the history and say why (and who provided
| the investments for automation given that Trump is a sharpie
| user).
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| I'm having trouble figuring out from the body of the article what
| the way mentioned in its title actually was.
|
| There's a list of nice business steps the company took (and I
| can't imagine starting work on the problem in 2018 hurt either),
| but I don't expect they were the only ones to take any specific
| one, so why did Sharpie in particular succeed? What's the recipe?
| Automate the crap out of your assembly line and promote (a lucky
| few among) your former assembly-line workers (who you definitely
| did not fire when you got high on automation) to technicians? I
| can't imagine that's a rare thought; yet this seems to be a rare
| success story.
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| It's a brand with household name recognition. It's also a bit
| of a plug piece (NWL has had a rough decade).
|
| The most newsworthy detail here is probably the WSJ publishing
| an article that could be construed as somewhat pro-labor.
| leobg wrote:
| Beautiful. Sounds like they're doing with pens in Maryville what
| Tesla did with the Model S in Fremont.
|
| > Peterson [...] found that the factory could use robots to do an
| increasing share of the packing. But he decided to keep the
| employees who knew the company and convert their jobs to roles
| such as automation engineering. In that case, an employee would
| fix a robot instead of packing a box. Peterson estimates the
| average wage at its Maryville facility, which employs 550 staff,
| has gone up some 50% over the past five years--without a change
| in head count.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| So a business used automation to decrease COGS? Doesn't sound
| noteworthy.
| lazide wrote:
| The US has (near as I can tell) forgotten even the basics.
|
| Like a coder writing code (by hand!) to make things more
| efficient somewhere, also seems noteworthy now.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I don't know what forgotten the basics means, but US
| manufacturing output in terms of USD is quite high relative
| to its population:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing
|
| 17%+ with 4% of the world's population means there must be
| some kind of automation expertise.
| lazide wrote:
| The US has steadily gone 'up market', and automated
| heavily in most industries.
|
| Skills like manual machining, and manual welding have
| gotten much harder to find and a smaller portion of the
| economy.
|
| As to if that matters?
|
| What Sharpie did in the US is super simple table stakes
| for manufacturing anywhere, it's only notable because it
| can be used in a larger political story.
| phil21 wrote:
| I really despise this talking point.
|
| Before Boeing had its epic fails, usually they were
| talked about as the prototypical "we make airplanes
| instead of rubber dog shit out of Hong Kong" example.
|
| But it neglected to show that Boeing outsourced a huge
| portion of the actual skillsets needed to build each
| individual component.
|
| There is utterly no comparison to $100B of airplanes
| being sold a year vs. $100B of various goods of diverse
| complexity and quality in terms of impact to the economy,
| workers, manufacturing knowledge, and even national
| security.
|
| If we had simply gone up market and retained useful
| engineering and manufacturing skills/talent
| pipeline/capacity I'd totally agree. But we have not. Not
| to any appreciable degree by any metric other than
| numbers on a spreadsheet.
|
| We are talking about this in a thread discussing
| manufacturing markers in the US as some sort of large
| win. If this article had been discussed in these contexts
| 60 years ago it'd have been seen as utterly pathetic.
| 201984 wrote:
| Measuring in currency can be rather misleading. Consider
| one country that manufactures a billion dollars of
| diamonds per year, and another that manufactures half a
| billion dollars of steel per year.
|
| Which has more industrial might? You need to compare
| what's actually being made and how much to draw
| conclusions.
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| What's noteworthy is that an American company didn't
| immediately fire its employees to make way for the cheapest
| experts it could find for the new roles. Instead, they
| retrained their existing people for the new roles.
| AfterHIA wrote:
| It's a small thing but it's these little victories that
| give me a much needed ethics boner.
| didntknowyou wrote:
| doubt it's some altruistics thing, likely retraining
| existing box packers were cheaper than hiring tech grads
| leobg wrote:
| Seems like you and Adam Smith put different weights on
| the value of altruism.
|
| > It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the
| brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from
| their regard to their own interest.
| appreciatorBus wrote:
| No one implied they were doing this altruistically. It's
| noteworthy simply because they bucked the conventional
| wisdom (offshore everything, US manufacturing cannot
| compete etc etc) and succeeded financially.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| corporations doing retraining, what a concept
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Isn't Tesla Fremont widely considered a failure?
|
| The Model S was an expensive car with a bad reputation for
| quality. Then in 2017 they introduced the Model 3 and their
| "Alien Dreadnought" automation. That significantly delayed mass
| production of the Model 3 and almost bankrupted the company.
|
| Tesla turned things around by building a factory in Shanghai,
| and learning how to build a car from the Chinese. They then
| basically copied the Shanghai factory to Germany.
| luckydata wrote:
| no, that factory makes a ton of cars. had teething problems
| like every other car factory in the world. source: my
| significant other worked at tesla for a decade, now at
| Rivian.
| nomel wrote:
| What's are your metrics of "failure"?
|
| Fremont factory has produced 3 million cars, in a
| manufacturing hostile/barren California (and thus Nevada
| gigafactory), covering ~50% cars produced yearly. [1]
|
| > Tesla turned things around by building a factory in
| Shanghai
|
| ~50% are made in China, with ~50% of those being _sold_ in
| China (well until this year), avoiding significant Chinese
| tariffs. [2]
|
| [1] https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-fremont-nevada-3-million/
|
| [2] Nice historic graph, including poor sales this year.
| https://carnewschina.com/2025/03/10/tesla-
| exports-3911-cars-...
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Sure, and the vast majority of those 3 million were cars
| were built after they disassembled their "alien
| dreadnought" factory and Tom Zhu et al went to China to
| learn how to build cars, and brought that knowledge back.
| nomel wrote:
| And all the other US manufactures originally learned how
| from Japan.
|
| Some of their original manufacturing ideas didn't work
| out, and they iterated to better processes. That's not
| failure. That's plain old boring fucking engineering.
|
| Do you think China is bad or something? Everyone,
| especially in the industry, _knows_ that there 's more
| manufacturing expertise in China, because that's where
| the vast majority of the world has outsourced their
| manufacturing (and pollution), for decades, and the
| forseable future. Just ask the politicians, who have been
| singing "manufacturing is never coming back to the US"
| for decades, to justify their policies that prevent
| people from manufacturing in their backyards.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > And all the other US manufactures originally learned
| how from Japan.
|
| Who learned Kaizen from an American.
| Animats wrote:
| That was a Musk problem. His two lead manufacturing execs
| quit when he wanted the plant automation installed without
| the usual factory testing, to cut the time to production in
| half. It didn't work. For a while, Tesla Fremont had a huge
| work force working in tents in the parking lot. Cost per car
| went up and quality went down, but cars came out.
|
| Tesla still seems to have quality problems, and never
| delivered the promised $30,000 car. Although BYD did.
| bsder wrote:
| > Tesla turned things around by building a factory in
| Shanghai, and learning how to build a car from the Chinese.
|
| That has very little to do with Fremont _the facility_.
|
| The Fremont facility is where Toyota showed GM how to build
| cars properly--an expensive lesson which GM and Tesla both
| decided to ignore.
|
| I would suggest that the real "innovation" of Tesla's foreign
| factories was simply getting them far enough away from Musk
| that he couldn't easily screw them up ...
| awful wrote:
| I suspect there is quite profit margin in Sharpies compared to
| other similar markers from the global market. Exactly what a
| tariff would do by insulating them from a global market pricing,
| allowing flexibility in rearranging their costs. *even
| considering quality issues.
| conductr wrote:
| > Newcomb joined the company 20 years ago as a packer of chair
| mats, which the facility made at the time. He took on new roles
| as years went by. When he reached a point where he wanted a
| leadership position, Newell's human-resources department said the
| company would give him the job, but he would need an
| undergraduate degree, the cost of which the company would cover.
|
| > Mike Newcomb now leads the molding department. Newcomb obtained
| a business degree from a local college and now leads the molding
| department, overseeing production of the 4.3 billion pen barrels
| and caps the facility makes each year.
|
| My question is always, why? Why was the degree required for this?
| He has 20 years of experience. Send him to a 4 week management
| training course or something. I went to business school for
| undergrad and it prepared me very little to run a molding
| department. I think this guys experience was already his biggest
| asset and this investment could have been significantly less
| expensive.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if the degree is one of those hard
| requirements they just have for such positions.
|
| That said, as someone who doesn't have a business degree,
| shouldn't it ideally prepare him better for working with the
| rest of the organization? Dealing with budgets, strategic plans
| from upper management, marketing etc?
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Because - and I hate the fact that it's this way - they need to
| ensure there is a salary gate for other positions at a similar
| level.
|
| Part of the challenge of organizational management is making
| decisions structurally bound to prevent negotiations for every
| single possible response.
|
| "Well Mike didn't have a degree, so why not me?" Would become
| the next big thing
|
| The "Simple" answer is, don't have dumb gates for hiring and
| have your managers actually behave like leaders who have a
| personal stake in the success of their business and hires.
|
| Other than rare, personality driven cases, this approach isn't
| even available as a concept for people who get into business
| for money or power - primarily because "the market" doesn't
| reward training people, because the last century has shown that
| people with money don't want to take the risk
| mulmen wrote:
| > Because - and I hate the fact that it's this way - they
| need to ensure there is a salary gate for other positions at
| a similar level.
|
| What evidence do you have to support this opinion as fact?
| fluoridation wrote:
| I think you're close but not quite there. I'm reminded of the
| scene from Office Space, where the Bobs say they prefer to
| avoid confrontation if possible.
|
| >"Well Mike didn't have a degree, so why not me?"
|
| "Because you don't have the right degree" is an easier and
| less confrontational answer than the truth ("the position was
| filled nepotistically", "you know what you did but the
| incidents are not properly documented", etc.).
| WalterBright wrote:
| In my experience, people who are self-taught or who learned by
| experience tend to have odd gaps in their knowledge.
|
| For example, the Shazam app. I knew right away it must be using
| Fourier analysis. But if one was self-taught, one might have
| never understood what the point of FA was, or even have been
| aware of its existence, and instead used kludgy, inept methods.
|
| For a personal example, I was once given the job of taking the
| graphic display on a CRT and mapping it onto a printer page.
| The addressing was different, the axes were different, the
| pixels/per inch were different. I knew what the tool was - a
| transformation matrix. Had it ginned up in an hour and it
| worked first try.
|
| A co-worker was completely baffled at this. He didn't know what
| a transformation matrix was, and likely would have otherwise
| spent a couple weeks on the problem and done a crappy job.
|
| I.e. one doesn't know what one doesn't know. The advantage of
| an accredited degree program is the curriculum is selected by
| people who know what you need to know, and the order in which
| information is best presented.
| greazy wrote:
| But does that apply to business management?
| WalterBright wrote:
| I do not have formal training in business management. But
| I'm pretty sure that formally learning it is not useless
| knowledge, if one intends to manage a business.
|
| For one example, learning accounting. A lot of people try
| to run a business without understanding how double-entry
| bookkeeping works. This gets them into trouble with the
| IRS, for one result, and with bankers, for another.
|
| During summer vacation, at loose ends, I signed up at the
| local college for a course in double-entry bookkeeping.
| It's paid off for me ever since.
| greazy wrote:
| My personal opinion is that BM is a weird world and I
| don't know how it can be standardized and taught in a
| formal setting.
|
| It is domain specific and sometimes even company
| specific. How such a thing can be standardised and
| formally taught is the question I'm interested in.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I have this issue myself. I was trained as a mechanical
| engineer, not a computer scientist, not a programmer. I'm
| pretty much self-taught as a programmer. I run into peculiar
| gaps in my knowledge that a formally educated computer
| scientist would consider basic knowledge.
|
| One of the reasons Andrei Alexandrescu and I worked well
| together as a team designing D is that he had the formal
| training, and I had the practical experience. Our abilities
| complemented each other's.
| WalterBright wrote:
| P.S. I once invented a concept, and proudly did a
| presentation on it. It was rudely brought to my attention
| that this was well known in computer science. Very, very
| embarrassing.
| ecshafer wrote:
| I am torn on this. I have friends who complain that they are
| engineers, and had to take so much math in school they don't
| use. They apparently dont see much value in just the fact they
| learned it, or the increased knowledge. However, no matter how
| much experience someone may have, I am not sure I am willing to
| trust a bridge designed by an engineer that couldnt pass a
| basic calculus sequence. To steelman this position, the college
| degree is a singal that they are capable of learning some more
| complex concepts. So even if it isnt a business degree, if they
| start talking about cost basis they can pick that up, and that
| they can read and write at a high enough level to function in
| management. It also shows that the person is serious about
| moving up.
| mulmen wrote:
| It has become popular to dismiss the benefits of higher
| education but I think there's still immense value in completing
| an undergraduate education. An undergraduate degree
| demonstrates an ability to succeed in a multi-disciplinary
| environment and to work collaboratively with peers. It gives
| the student knowledge outside their core domain which creates
| opportunities for cross-pollination of ideas. The only argument
| against higher education is the cost which wasn't a factor
| here.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Sharpie is special and can make one thing essentially forever.
| fraserharris wrote:
| It was a surprise learning how applicable your statement is
| when I was selling technology products into consumer packaged
| goods (CPG) companies. Consumer preference is very hard to
| change once it is established, and leading CPG companies spend
| an enormous amount establishing that preference.
| asdefghyk wrote:
| Amazing that made in USA with competive price to if made in China
| Manufacturing in China is at wxpwnxw of worker conditions and
| more lax OHS lays and more lax environmental and worker rights,
| working longer hours and more days.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| "wxpwnxw"?
| dfc wrote:
| It has to be a super strange autocorrect for "expense", but I
| don't know why anyone is typing wxpwnxw a lot ...
| fluoridation wrote:
| It's probably just a typo on a normal keyboard. All the
| missed keys are on the left hand side.
| bityard wrote:
| It is insanely hard to build basic things in the US anymore, even
| if there is a market, even if the market will pay your prices,
| even if you have the capital to start, and even if you can hire
| reliable workers. And those are all HUGE ifs.
|
| The biggest problem is that the base underlying our manufacturing
| capability has almost completely evaporated. You need tool and
| die companies to build parts for your manufacturing machines, but
| almost none are left. There are only a few plastic injection
| manufacturing companies left, and they are either fully booked or
| on the path to shutting down. (No, you can't 3D print products
| for the mass market, it's way too slow and expensive.) Young
| people think of trades and manufacturing jobs as fall-backs that
| only drop-outs who couldn't hack college get into. You will make
| many times more money as a salescritter convincing people to buy
| things they don't need than using decades of engineering
| experience to build the things they do.
|
| It's a popular misconception that China's manufacturing advantage
| is cheaper labor. This was _maybe_ true for a while, their
| advantage right now is that they have all the things mentioned
| above: they have the tool and die shops, they have the supply
| chains, and they have workforce. They can go from product idea to
| shipping in a week. I do not celebrate the Chinese government for
| much, but making sure they had a robust manufacturing base from
| top to bottom was the biggest and most important thing they have
| ever done. The US government let ours wither and die. Which has
| made our economy remarkably fragile and essentially decimated the
| whole idea of a blue-collar middle class.
|
| Destin from Smarter Every Day encountered all of this when he
| tried to make a better grill brush using only a handful of parts
| and _still_ did not manage to make the whole thing using only US-
| originated parts. It's a fascinating window into how hard it is
| to make anything at all here:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTGwcHQfLY
| DetroitThrow wrote:
| Yes, for example, it's shocking how much harder it became for a
| random market entrant to get into the business of making auto
| parts since the 2008 shutdown, which consolidated and shuttered
| much of the supply chain. It's industrial capacity that will
| take decades to "grow" back, if ever.
| bsder wrote:
| > You will make many times more money as a salescritter
| convincing people to buy things they don't need than using
| decades of engineering experience to build the things they do.
|
| That's the fundamental problem. The pay for industrial roles is
| _garbage_ compared to the skill required. Anyone talented
| enough to do those roles can obviously see that and opts to do
| something else.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Nevermind that even if you clear all those hurdles and get your
| product to market, China will copy it, likely improve it, and
| start selling it on Amazon for half your materials cost.
| Patents be damned.
| shinycode wrote:
| As a side note, your comment makes me think of the software
| world where we have amazing talent and things looks like it's
| sliding to being done in the majority with AI. Once that's the
| case and we don't have developers anymore then we're out of
| knowledge and at the mercy of. Not being able to build complex
| systems in autonomy. A bit like what happened in the industry
| you describe
| aDyslecticCrow wrote:
| That video from smarter every day was an eye opener. The effort
| to just make the simple mold was frightening. The chase to find
| a single source for a standard screw disheartening.
|
| I've talked with some friends here in europe after seeing that
| video, and apparently tool and die remains more avaliable here.
|
| I suspect the larger travel distance to China from europe makes
| create a market nieche that keep it alive where iteration is
| needed. I dont think we succeeded better politically basides
| that luck. (Trades is frowned opon in the same way)
|
| Locally we have a good prototype industry for cirquitboard
| design (we work with them regularly), but very few large scale
| producers. The companies that make electronics nationally often
| have their own cirquitboard for their usecase, which is capital
| intensive to set-up.
| s1mon wrote:
| It makes sense that this is possible. It's a very high volume
| item, with limited parts. The raw materials are not unique to any
| one location. If you have the capital to invest in a highly
| automated production line (which I'm sure cost many million USD),
| you will eventually get the ROI and the costs will be similar in
| many locations around the world. Labor costs are a small portion
| of the COGS (cost of goods sold). If most of the market is in the
| US, then shipping cost savings probably outweigh the higher labor
| and real estate costs. Energy costs and raw materials are likely
| similar enough to be a wash.
|
| Contrast this with consumer electronics, especially new products.
| Those have huge benefits from the concentration of the supply
| chain and the agility of the supply chain in Southern China. That
| doesn't exist in the US.
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