Facing Today’s Manufacturing Woes

Meanwhile, our favorite price safety valve—importing paper—doesn’t work anymore. Mill consolidations have put a distinctly global face on the paper market, so there’s no more exploiting small pockets of unbalanced supply and demand. Globalization levels such anomalies. The weak dollar undercuts our buying power, so we can’t pit imports against domestics. And even if we could, shipping costs would gobble up all the savings.