Supporting local business (manufacturing, not the mom & pop retail stores that represent an entirely different scenario) is more difficult these days due to such efficient global supply chains and specialization in the production of component parts. American cars are primarily assembled in Mexico and Canada. The largest car manufacturer producing cars from factories in the US is Toyota.
iPhone's are certainly designed in the US, but even if Apple wanted to assembled it in the US (which they are moving to do with more of their products), almost all of the components have to come from abroad as specialization limits production. South Korea owns the LCD/OLED market, led by Samsung. Apple has to buy from their direct competitor in the phone market. Same with memory chips. But modems come from Qualcomm, which is a US company, and Intel is trying to grab a portion of that business. The phones may then be assembled by Foxconn (a Taiwanese company that assembles in mainland China) but the parts come from everywhere (another example is Gorilla glass from Corning, a US company).
For computers we use, PC or Mac, IBM may have invented platter memory storage which has evolved into our little hard drives, but Thailand companies now own all the manufacturing of those devices. Batteries, well, we know who owns that production. Granted Tesla manufactures a ton of batteries, but they are for their own cars, not the general battery market (and wouldn't work all that well for vaping, as they're 10A batteries which fit their needs)
Evolv is a US company that may hold the IP rights to TC, but rely on some of the components of their boards to be imported, and those boards are generally designed and assembled into the final products in China. These are all just examples of "high tech" manufacturing.
Machined products can be produced in the US, but the limited size runs of the small companies here keep prices high. But the infrastructure demands for attys isn't dependent on electronic parts, so they can stay in the game. It also means other countries can also compete, with great designs and standards worldwide. The same is true for mech mods which are simple to manufacture without any electronic components that have to be sourced. E liquid manufacturing is certainly a country specific product, and US liquid makers own their respective country. Not many vapers import Chinese e liquids these days (or until May 2020 when the FDA may put them out of business. So supporting US manufacturers is a lot more complicated than looking for a Made in USA (or your own respective country).
Now the retail side is different. A small shop survives on higher margin items to provide their revenue as there's no economy of scale they can benefit from like a large retailer (who are dying anyway and not just in the vape market). They also don't have large amounts of capital available for inventory. Lower priced juice moves well, higher priced hardware not so much. And given the large number of hardware manufacturers, maintaining a broad selection of gear is just not possible. Especially in a market with a new "improved" model coming out weekly. So if you want something special, you're forced to find vendors with "big" warehouses to have a decent selection. At that point, whether the vendor is US based or overseas doesn't matter all that much. Prices on authentic hardware are not dramatically different between them outside of greater access by Chinese vendors to close outs/clearance sales at great prices on Chinese products. The big difference is in counterfeit items which is dominated by those Chinese vendors. Whether you ethically feel it is good or bad to buy them, knowing they are "styled", is up to you and your own judgement.
tl;dr Chinese vendors hold the edge in some areas, but not all, and US large online vendors can be quite competitive on authentic vape hardware.
. Ive been lucky with unregulated and mech squonks and bf rdta's. Spend $75 and its free postage.
