Beautiful. Sounds like they’re doing with pens in Maryville what Tesla did with the Model S in Fremont.
> Peterson […] found that the factory could use robots to do an increasing share of the packing. But he decided to keep the employees who knew the company and convert their jobs to roles such as automation engineering. In that case, an employee would fix a robot instead of packing a box. Peterson estimates the average wage at its Maryville facility, which employs 550 staff, has gone up some 50% over the past five years—without a change in head count.
corporations doing retraining, what a concept
So a business used automation to decrease COGS? Doesn’t sound noteworthy.
What's noteworthy is that an American company didn't immediately fire its employees to make way for the cheapest experts it could find for the new roles. Instead, they retrained their existing people for the new roles.
doubt it's some altruistics thing, likely retraining existing box packers were cheaper than hiring tech grads
It's a small thing but it's these little victories that give me a much needed ethics boner.
The US has (near as I can tell) forgotten even the basics.
Like a coder writing code (by hand!) to make things more efficient somewhere, also seems noteworthy now.
I don’t know what forgotten the basics means, but US manufacturing output in terms of USD is quite high relative to its population:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing
17%+ with 4% of the world’s population means there must be some kind of automation expertise.
The US has steadily gone ‘up market’, and automated heavily in most industries.
Skills like manual machining, and manual welding have gotten much harder to find and a smaller portion of the economy.
As to if that matters?
What Sharpie did in the US is super simple table stakes for manufacturing anywhere, it’s only notable because it can be used in a larger political story.
It is hard to discern if this is an uplifting story, or a rather depressing story about regaining lost basic manufacturing process skills. Any and all countries should be able to make basic and essential things.
Anytime humans create systems that allow a group of individuals to orchestrate a higher energy output of productive activity, it’s an uplifting story because it’s literally how wealth is generated for society.
Unless all of that new wealth is captured and horded by a handful of people.
This rarely happens 100%, as you see in the article the employees make more when they enable higher energy efficiency.
I’m having trouble figuring out from the body of the article what the way mentioned in its title actually was.
There’s a list of nice business steps the company took (and I can’t imagine starting work on the problem in 2018 hurt either), but I don’t expect they were the only ones to take any specific one, so why did Sharpie in particular succeed? What’s the recipe? Automate the crap out of your assembly line and promote (a lucky few among) your former assembly-line workers (who you definitely did not fire when you got high on automation) to technicians? I can’t imagine that’s a rare thought; yet this seems to be a rare success story.
It's a brand with household name recognition. It's also a bit of a plug piece (NWL has had a rough decade).
The most newsworthy detail here is probably the WSJ publishing an article that could be construed as somewhat pro-labor.
I suspect there is quite profit margin in Sharpies compared to other similar markers from the global market. Exactly what a tariff would do by insulating them from a global market pricing, allowing flexibility in rearranging their costs. *even considering quality issues.
Great, now the few insular successes of manufacturing in the U.S. will be trotted out as support for deranged economic policies :(.
I can't decide if that's the same, or different from, trotting out the very few tariff-boosting economists in support of deranged economic policies.
Tariffs are an inefficient tax on consumption. If the parties keep failing to agree to figure out how to increase revenue, this is the best stop gap we could hope for. Especially if it generates over $1T.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/19/economy/us-tariff-rebate-chec...
Why are you implying that the goal is to increase revenue? This admin also pushed for tax cuts simultaneously and the budget they passed added to the deficit again.
Tariffs at their current rate canceled the deficit added by the tax cuts according to experts.
What experts that are not part of this administration? He fired people who gave him numbers he didn’t like already like the head of BLS so I don’t trust any numbers self reported by them.
And oh, is this also with that made up math they used to say that continuing the existing tax cuts past their expiration date didn’t count as increasing the deficit?
Newell Brands stock price fell sharply during the first Trump administration from $53 and is now at $5.40.
Marketing this as a success story of U.S. manufacturing is insane. If the WSJ honestly thinks the outlook is better now, it should at least provide the history and say why (and who provided the investments for automation given that Trump is a sharpie user).