When Did Everything Get So Expensive and So Crappy?

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Two Big Reasons Actually Supported by the Data

I’m old enough to remember when “Made in America” actually meant something. My dad’s 1972 Frigidaire fridge is still humming along in the garage. The Levi’s I bought in 1983 still fit (don’t laugh) and haven’t fallen apart. The Craftsman tools I bought at Sears in the 80s, Lifetime warranty and they meant it. Fast forward to today. I just paid $110 for a pair of “premium” jeans that feel like cardboard and already have a hole in the pocket after three washes. My buddy just replaced his two-year-old Samsung washer for the third time. And don’t get me started on the price of steak.

So when did everything get so expensive and so crappy at the same time?

I’ve got two theories I’ve been kicking around for years.

I asked Grok (the AI that doesn’t lie to you) to check if I’m just an old guy yelling at the television. Turns out I’m not.

Theory #1: We traded American quality for cheap Chinese stuff… and killed our own factories in the process. Remember when Walmart, Home Depot, and Target showed up and suddenly everything got cheaper? That wasn’t magic. That was China. After China joined the WTO in 2001, we got flooded with imports. A million U.S. manufacturing jobs disappeared in about a decade. Entire towns that made furniture, textiles, appliances—gone. We replaced “built like a tank” with “built to last until the warranty expires.” And yeah, the stuff got cheaper… for a while (but now they've gone up). But we lost the ability to make high-quality goods at scale. The factories closed, the skilled workers retired or retrained into something else, and now we’re dependent on containers coming across the Pacific. Funny thing: Chinese quality has actually gotten a lot better while our domestic capacity has atrophied. We won the price war and lost the quality war.

Theory #2: There’s no real competition left. Free-market people (like me) always say competition keeps prices low and quality high. But look around—where’s the competition? Four giant meatpackers now control 85% of the beef market. Family cattle ranches? Getting auctioned off by the thousands. Since 2017 we’ve lost over 150,000 small farms. The little guy can’t breathe under the regulations, taxes, and paperwork that the big boys hire entire departments to handle. Same story in retail, banking, beer, you name it. A handful of corporations own everything, set the prices, and lobby D.C. to keep it that way. When four companies can decide what a pound of ground chuck costs nationwide, that’s not capitalism—that’s an oligopoly with extra steps. The Numbers Don’t Lie

What We Lost	1970s–1990s	Today
U.S. manufacturing jobs	~17 million	~13 million
Top 4 beef packers’ market share	~50–60%	85%
Small family farms	Losing ~10k–15k per year	Losing 30k+ per year
Small-business share of the economy	~50–55%	~35%

So What Now? I’m not saying we turn back the clock to 1975 (though my waistline wishes we could). But pretending this is all “normal inflation” or “just supply chains” is nonsense. We offshored our industrial base for cheap socks and plastic crap. We let a few mega-corporations buy up the competition while regulators looked the other way.

Want cheaper, better stuff again?

• Start making it here. t

• Break up the monopolies.

• Cut the red tape that’s strangling small businesses and family farms.

Until then, enjoy your $9/lb ground beef and your washing machine that dies the week after the warranty expires. Made in America doesn't mean just patriotism, it is the way to bring competition back to the free marketplace.

Make the free market free again!

. —Jim P.S. If you’re as angry about this as I am, hit reply and tell me what you’ve noticed in your neck of the woods. I read every one.