What were the factors that lead to the decline of the American textile industry?
There were three main areas of the textile industry: a third were in apparel, a third were bed and bath products and a third were industrial and automotive textiles. The apparel industry was affected first. For example, to make jeans you had 26 or 27 different parts that needed to be attached. That was very expensive because it was all labor-intensive. That section began to move off-shore, to Mexico, and that’s where NAFTA got started. The bed and bath industry didn’t face the same problem, because they sold their products directly to the retailers. They made the brand name products for JCPenneys and others. Then big box retailers, like Wal-Mart and then Target, came along. The problem came, as the Wal-Marts grew, the JCPenneys and others had trouble competing because they didn’t have the same volume as Wal-Mart. Over time, the industry survived by getting more efficient, but supplying the retailers became more and more difficult, particularly when the retailers kept asking for lower a
