Other Crap

Urban Legends Reference Pages: True or False: "Senator John Kerry's wife owns Heinz, a company that outsources much of its work abroad" Not only false, of course, but ridiculous. (1) She has about 4% of Heinz's stock (2) Heinz doesn't outsource American work to overseas factories. It simply produces products locally in various countries for sale in those countries, ala Coca-Cola. 60% of the company's sales come from outside the USA, and it is in the food business, so it produces close to the market it serves.

• I've noticed that "outsourcing" has been widely misunderstood by the press and politicians. Coca-Cola produces Coke in Africa and ships it with African trucks driven by Africans, but those jobs could not possibly go to Americans.
• Basic economics only allows the flow of products to go in one direction. Even if Coke wanted to produce every drop of its soft drinks in Atlanta, the cost of doing so, then shipping it overseas, would drive the price of the product up so high that it could not be sold in Africa. The only way to sell there is to produce there. The last time I was in Zimbabwe, in 1996, the price of a bottle of Coke was about ten cents in convenience stores. The same bottle would cost five times that in the USA, ten times that in Scandinavia.