We just returned from a 2-week trip to China. We went there to source rough rock and to check out stone cutting factories. If this offends you, please stop reading now. It is not my intention to anger anybody. I once got a very scathing letter from a customer who received a stone from me labeled as from China. She felt I was responsible for the fall of the American Empire, because I bought from that country. I believe in the Made in the USA concept, and try to practice it whenever possible. However reality is seldom what we want it to be. The truth is our decision to use Chinese stone cutting factories is not really an economical, or convenient, decision. It is a necessary for survival decision. It truly doesn’t save us money. We have to ship rough rock over there, which is heavy and expensive to ship, and we pay import customs and duties there. Then we have to ship the stone products back here, again paying customs and duties. Because it is much cheaper to ship large shipments we only ship back once a year-so it is almost a whole year turn around for us to get stone product back. This makes it hard to know which products will be popular, as well as makes it impossible to take custom cutting or product orders. Throw in 2 trips a year over there to teach skills and check quality, language barriers that often cause us to not get back what we ordered, and the risk of items getting lost or stuck in customs and it is easy to see that it isn’t all that much cheaper and definitely less convenient than cutting it here in the U.S.
So why, you might ask, don’t we have a lapidary cutting shop here? The answer is very simple, because we have tried, repeatedly. But the failure rate is very high. Lapidary cutting of rough rock is a skill that takes lots of years of practice to perfect. It is costly and difficult to train unskilled labor. And when they finally do get good, they quickly learn they can be more successful if they go out on their own. Hence you trained your competitors! There are skilled cutters out there. But in my experience if they aren’t working for themselves, it is because they have alcohol or drug dependencies and are unreliable. We hired a very skilled homeless guy. Bought him a bed, refrigerator and microwave and let him sleep in the shop. He went around telling everyone we kept him chained in the shop working. There’s the one who went out for a “pack of cigarettes”, leaving the lapidary shop wide open and never returned. There’s the one who worked for us for about a year and decided even though we had been in business many years, he “made us who we were” and he deserved a partnership. There’s the time we were robbed and how they did it and what they took told us it was an inside job, and then there was the one who smoked all kinds of funny things, but after three months told us he had lung cancer from the rock dust and he was suing us. Oh, and my personal favorite, the one who stole my husbands identity. We found that out when I got a call from a woman late one night asking how long I had been married because “he didn’t tell me he was married!”
To be fair-there are also talented cutters who do freelance custom jobs. They are usually expensive and one person usually cannot cut a serious quantity of stone.
Unfortunately China is now facing some serious importing rough rock issues and is also experiencing a lot more social issues. I am told that workers there would much rather take low paying but easy work jobs, rather than get paid more for a harder rock cutting job.
I will tell you more of our actual adventures and about the importing rocks trouble in my next blog next month! Thanks for reading!
