Fancy Lamps

Cooper Lamp should not be here. Cooper should have vanished in the great death of American manufacturing that gathered steam in the last half of the twentieth century and has accelerated in recent years. The United States has lost almost twenty per cent of its manufacturing jobs just since 2000. This was the year that Cooper's biggest local competitor, Stiffel Lamps, collapsed under debt, selling off its assets—which included a headquarters building that dated back to 1871—and tossing hundreds of people out of work. Cooper Lamp should have been torn down to make way for the expensive town houses going up all over Chicago's North Side. These are occupied by professionals who then begin to complain about the noises and smells of whatever industry remains around them. The Stiffel factory, which once turned out 250,000 brass lamps a year, now holds loft condominiums.

The choice seems to be either perish, like Stiffel, or move overseas where labour costs are a fraction of what they are in the United States. Anyone vaguely familiar with Chicago business can reel off a list of the departed. Just last summer, the red wagons of Radio Flyer, made in Chicago for ninety years, relocated to China. Brach's Candy, produced in an enormous West Side plant, moved down to Mexico to dodge high American sugar tariffs. A thousand workers lost their jobs.

Stiffel's collapse was blamed on the company's failure to flee to China. Cooper survives by one of several strategies that—at least so far—have thwarted the competitive advantage of manufacturers in the Far East. The saving fact is this: really expensive lamps are a niche market, with a tiny demand compared to the overwhelming global hunger for cheap lamps. When the Chinese build lamp factories, they want to make lamps that can be sold by the hundreds of thousands, for $20 apiece at Wal-Mart, not lamps that cost $500, of which Saks Fifth Avenue can maybe sell a hundred over the course of a year.

'We offer a very high quality product,' says Lauren. 'Our shades are hand sewn, using unique fabrics. We use unique materials. We put things together in a unique fashion and as a result we have a very good name among the designers and decorators, and the stores. We sell to very high-end stores, some of the best department stores: Macy's, Marshall Field's, Bloomingdale's, Neiman Marcus, Horchow.'

Laboriously constructed, high-end goods are one way for American companies to survive, at the moment. Another is to embrace technologies that trump the benefits of cheap labour. A Chinese worker might earn $6,000 a year. But a Kawasaki industrial welding robot doesn't earn any salary at all.