http://www.dealerscope.com/article/lg-samsung-respond-quickly-trump-washing-machine-tariff/
All because, for whatever perverse reason, Donaldus Minimus thinks it's unfair of American washing machine buyers to prefer
equal-to-superior-but-less-expensive Samsung (who have been building them in the United States for a number of years) and
LG (who began building an American plant in Tennessee last summer) to those made by Whirlpool, which has been nagging
Washington for a number of years to slap such tariffs on.
Whirlpool Has Trapped Washington in a Spin Cycle
The washing-machine maker’s close relationship with the government may pose problems for consumers
By George F. Will
16 December 2017
http://www.nationalreview.com/node/454698/print
A household appliance will be the next stepping stone on America’s path to restored greatness. The government is poised to punish many Americans, in the name of protecting a few of them, because, in the government’s opinion, too many of them are choosing to buy foreign-made washing machines for no better reason than that the buyers think they are better. If you are wondering why the government is squandering its dwindling prestige by having opinions about such things, you have not been paying attention to Whirlpool’s demonstration that it is more adept at manipulating Washington than it is at making washing machines.
In 2006, when Whirlpool was paying $1.7 billion to buy its largest competitor, Maytag, federal regulators fretted that this would give the company too much market power. Whirlpool said: Fear not, competition from foreign manufacturers such as South Korea’s Samsung and LG will keep us sharp and benefit American consumers. Now, however, Whirlpool, which is weary of competition, has persuaded the U.S. International Trade Commission to rule that Samsung and LG should be reproached for what, eleven years ago, Whirlpool said it welcomed: competition.
The U.S. market for washing machines has grown 35 percent in just five years. Whirlpool’s share of this market, although not the 70 percent it was in 2006, is still more than Samsung’s and LG’s combined 35 percent. In this happy circumstance, Whirlpool is profitable. It would, however, like to be more so . . .
. . . Before Whirlpool became dependent on government, it depended on Sears, which in the 1920s threw a financial lifeline to a struggling appliance manufacturer, Upton Machine Co., that became Whirlpool. According to the Wall Street Journal, as recently as 2002, when Sears sold 40 percent of the major appliances bought in America, sales through Sears generated about a fifth of Whirlpool’s revenues. In October, Sears announced that it would stop selling Whirlpool-brand products because Whirlpool is powerful enough to make pricing demands that “would have prohibited us from†selling those products “at a reasonable price.â€
Sears is not what it was just 15 years ago, and is a shadow of what it was in the 1960s, when its sales were almost 1 percent of U.S. GDP. Sears has been prostrated not by perfidious foreigners but by America’s efficient “big box†retailers (Walmart, Home Depot, Best Buy, Lowe’s, etc.) and by Amazon. The real villains, however, are American consumers, with their persnickety search for high quality and low prices . . .
p.s. I've just put a load of laundry into . . . my nice front-loading LG machine. Which I've had for nine years and counting.
And as soon as that's done, it's going into that nice matching LG dryer of the same age, and counting.
