That all sounds fun and good, but keep in mind that their current buildings and land were paid off many, many, many years ago. Mortgage/Rent is not hitting their bottom lines. And it's not as easy to sell (try damn near impossible) industrial (especially a site that will require an EPA clean-up) to pack up and move. Then you have to move machine tools and industrial equipment. You can't just run down to U-Haul and get a box truck, throw the wife and kids in the front and head off into the sunset.
Plus trying to maintain production (you actually have to build ahead and have finished goods inventory laid in while your dissembling your factory, moving it cross country and the re-assemble it. The fun part is actually getting everything to work again.) When we moved B-way from Kilbourn and Cermak to 31st and Central we had purchased Central Can Co. Even running their machines flat out 24/7 in three shifts, we still had to have 8 months of Finished Goods Inventory while we moved 400+ truckloads of industrial equipment. And we ran out of stuff there near the end. The cupboard was quite bare.
And it wasn't cheap. If there hadn't been the vacant lot next door where we built the warehouse additional, we'd still be in two separate hundred+ year old plants.
^All of that^
Most of our production site got moved to eastern europe last year.
There's quite a bit of good speculation why our site is still open:
1. The few processes we still do at our are difficult and are more careful craftsmanship than anything that could be automated and the handful of us that do what we do are the best in the world. This is akin to worker at Colt or S&W that does the final stoning/fitting of trigger/sears in their custom shops- expensive but nigh impossible to replace in a short period of time.
2. The site itself- old building, paid for many times over, possible superfund site, grandfathered in on a lot of environmental regulations that are looser than even eastern europe, and its rumored that the corporation may have paid a lot more for our site than its worth.
Moving most of our processes to E.Europe was not smooth, and this was factoring in our employees were very dedicated (and well paid) to transfer the technology and build up a year's worth of inventory. There were other European sites in our corporation that were moved to the new site as well, with less cooperation, those moves were a disaster.
