I think food's different. The idea is that transporting food is a waste of energy and thus that local food will be more environmentally friendly. Doesn't seem to hold up, generally, but naïvely, it's a reasonable heuristic. It's usually not a nationalistic thing, but a distance thing.
With manufacturing, however, it is usually nationalistic. There's also a strong protectionalism behind "made in America" movements. To me, those seem to essentially be equivalent to snitching in the prisoner's dilemma: we're better of iff we favor our own products and foreigners don't favor their own.
But nationalism aside, it could definitely be that due to the idea that American-made (or first-world-made) products are better, the target audience is people who value quality over price, and thus quality will be chosen for in manufacturing and the business can still thriv. If you manufacture in newly-industrialized nations, you're doing it to cut price as much as possible, often sacrificing skill/experience=quality.
I should also add a third consideration: a lot of chocolate is produced by slave labor. A lot of t-shirts are made in abusive conditions. A lot of toys are made in emission-unrestricted factories. Choosing an industrialized country means choosing relatively stringent and enforced workers' rights and environmental protections.
This may even hold true with food, despite the way we treat migrant farm workers in the US. Avocados producers in Mexico are often under the thumb of by drug cartels. Those produced in California--probably not so much.
I've always assumed it's more beneficial to buy the cheapest and donate the money you saved to an effective charity. But how many people calculate and apportion out their savings that way? Sounds nice, but if it's not feasible to get people to do it, the rational decision is to advocate for an achievable alternative. Maybe local is that, at least with some goods.
With manufacturing, however, it is usually nationalistic. There's also a strong protectionalism behind "made in America" movements. To me, those seem to essentially be equivalent to snitching in the prisoner's dilemma: we're better of iff we favor our own products and foreigners don't favor their own.
But nationalism aside, it could definitely be that due to the idea that American-made (or first-world-made) products are better, the target audience is people who value quality over price, and thus quality will be chosen for in manufacturing and the business can still thriv. If you manufacture in newly-industrialized nations, you're doing it to cut price as much as possible, often sacrificing skill/experience=quality.
I should also add a third consideration: a lot of chocolate is produced by slave labor. A lot of t-shirts are made in abusive conditions. A lot of toys are made in emission-unrestricted factories. Choosing an industrialized country means choosing relatively stringent and enforced workers' rights and environmental protections.
This may even hold true with food, despite the way we treat migrant farm workers in the US. Avocados producers in Mexico are often under the thumb of by drug cartels. Those produced in California--probably not so much.
I've always assumed it's more beneficial to buy the cheapest and donate the money you saved to an effective charity. But how many people calculate and apportion out their savings that way? Sounds nice, but if it's not feasible to get people to do it, the rational decision is to advocate for an achievable alternative. Maybe local is that, at least with some goods.