NAFTAed in the Back by Congress

NAFTAed in the Back
by Lloyd Hudson Frye

It all sounded good. Like the European Union, North America would stop charging tariffs on goods shipped inside the northern hemisphere. It sounded fair. Mexico wouldn’t be penalized for growing tomatoes and could sell them in the United States for more money than before. Then with the extra money they could afford to buy US manufactured machinery cheaper, to harvest their tomatoes. That makes for a win-win situation, right? Canadian-American trade, already our biggest trading partner, increases with tariffs out of the way. It would be just one big happy family of trading partners, with everyone getting richer. What’s not to like, on a deal like that.

Before downsizing there was the technology revolution of the seventies. You know where customers could bring up a screen and check their orders so companies could lay off the customer service people, who used to expedite and quote lead times. Now the customer could see right away what the projected ship date would be, with no way to ask a live person to help get it done sooner. Finally, sales people would just tell the customer 6-8 weeks and if it didn’t happen, they’d say 2 more weeks, and if that didn’t happen they’d say 2 more weeks, and so on until the customer gave up asking. A type of service economy they still tout as the best in the world to this day.