Spotted Online – Chinese Labor and Toys

Global Toy News has a story on tensions in China. With so very many toys (and games, this could directly affect my work) made in China it’s always useful to keep an eye on the country, and labor issues may very well lead to an increase in the cost of toys.

Chinese inflation was 5.4% last month which annualizes to 64.8%. U.S. inflation, as a comparison, was up .05% in March which annualizes out to 6%. Chinese inflation was 10 times higher than in the US for March.

As the story says, this isn’t likely to affect us immediately. At the office I’m working on getting September releases to print, so there’s a bit of a delay between what happens now and when it affects the US market — and there’s no guarantee that these labor issues will lead to anything more than some grumbling.

But it’s still a good idea to watch what’s happening, because there’s no way of knowing what will happen. Worst case scenario is we see a significant increase in toy prices right around Christmas. No, strike that. Absolute doomsday case is the global market flips and China starts manufacturing in the US.

Neither one of those is all that likely to happen, but it sure sounds scary. And just imagine what the search engines will do with some of the keywords in this post.