I met Dane Chapin for the first time, an entrepreneur in San Diego area, in 2012, when he gave me a ride in his Prius and told me that I was completely wrong about climate change. Since then we have been good friends. Sometimes he is politically left, sometimes on my right side. I have always admired his curiosity, optimism and independent thinking, especially if we disagree – as we did about his voice for Donald Trump in the last elections.
One hundred days after this administration is not happy. “With Trump I thought, maybe, there might be a method for madness,” he told me on Saturday. “I am now worried that there is madness in his method.”
Now hearing Van Dane is particularly valuable for the insight that he offers why a critical constituency of the business but non-Maga side of the base of Trump-Begint to acidify the president. It is not about deportations, foreign aid, federal financing of universities or one of the issues that Animate the usual critics of Trump. It’s about the rates.
“I am forced in survival mode with regard to my company and our 80 employees, where I for care as a family,” Dane told me. “I have bigger things to worry about than what’s going on with Harvard.”
Dane’s most important company, which started his family more than 30 years ago, is USAOPOilOr simply “the OP”. It makes theme versions of board games such as Monopoly and Clue, and brings new market, such as a family party game called Tapple. His employees, he said, have excellent benefits and salaries ranging from the high five figures on UP. He also told me that the company assesses around 2,000 game ideas per year. Production will come between five and six.
A few years ago Dane tried to start a separate company with the actor Scott Eastwood, called Made Here, who focused on products made in the United States. Great concept, but it didn’t come true: “Americans love low prices more than they hate a” made in China “sticker,” Dane concluded.
With regard to the OP, about three -quarters of his games are made in China, made with the rest in the United States. He acknowledges that logistics would be hotter to produce them closer to his primary market.
But that is not the way this market works. China, he said, has “a highly developed supply chain with which America can enjoy a wide range of quality toys and games at very affordable prices.” If he had to make all his products in his own country, the selling prices for most of his games would rise to around $ 35 to $ 40, from $ 20 to $ 25. “There would be no market for this price,” he said, and he should also “shrink” his workforce. Regarding the movement of production to countries such as India or Vietnam, it would take years. Without transition time, Trump’s rates have ‘the potential to erase the toy industry’.
That is the state of emergency that unfolds in its industry and beyond. In mid -March Dane gave the green light for 15 containers with goods that had to be sent from China. That was when the rate percentage was 20 percent. Before the goods could arrive in Vancouver for shipping to Indianapolis, the rate percentage had risen to 145 percent, which may cost the company an extra $ 920,000 extra.
“These goods can now make a return to China to enable us to avoid the rate of 145 percent until the more permanent and lower rate is decided,” DANE explained. The tsunami of economic consequences is fast. He has put all the production -based production on hold. “There is a very narrow window to restart production that makes shelves possible for holiday shopping on time” – by which he means Christmas. “The fired at many companies have already happened,” he added. “We do more a daily fire exercise than running our company.”
What does DANE think of the general trade policy of the Trump administration? He has no objection to taking a harder line on China. But he is insulted that the president makes rate exceptions for major technology companies, but not for the smaller American companies that should defend the administration.
“Apple has more than $ 60 billion in net cash in the bank and a market capitalization that is 231 times larger than the market capitalization of the two largest American toy companies together,” he noticed. “The toy industry is economically a blip, but we have been deeply jeopardized by the chaotic and random implementation of the trade policy.”
Does this all mean that he now wants him to vote for Kamala Harris? Not at all. Trump, he says, was “better than the Democratic alternative: namely a president, Biden, who clearly misled the country about his mental health, and a candidate in-the-disposal, Harris, which comes from the anti-business progressive wing of California politics who are ruined the state.”
“I don’t regret my voice, given the choices,” he added. “I regret current trade policy.”
Certain readers of this column can be tempted to condemn DANE for giving more to the business results than the well -being of the country, as they see. That seems moral and political stump.
Moral, because Dane’s focus on the bottom line translates directly into the livelihood of 80 employees and the well-being of their family-and-big good, in my book, than just screaming about the terribility of Trump. Politics, because Trump’s disastrous management of the economy should not be an opportunity to reproduce dissatisfied Trump voters. It is an opportunity for a moderate, entrepreneurial, corporate -friendly democrat to win them. “A drop of honey,” as Abraham Lincoln once said, “catches more flying than a gallon bile.”
An extra point in the spirit of friendship: the rates that Dane and so many others now suffer were loudly troubled by the president during the campaign. The fickle and hard -handy way they are imposed is of a piece with Trump’s fickle and harsh character. And the contempt for legality, procedure, consultation and fairness that forms the basis of the current economic chaos is no surprise of a president who seems to think that he can rule through an endless sequence of executive orders and social media posts.
Voters who thought they could afford to be indifferent to the indecent and political, have to draw the lesson: if you release a pirate, don’t be surprised if he takes your ship.
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