Me either, but the consumers need to be smart and not buy disposable stuff, too. Lots of our money goes to China for disposable and junky stuff that ends up in the landfill.
At least most of the money for these orchids stays in the US. Maybe . . . when Jim and I did an orchid hunt in Apopka in February, one of the sellers had a truck there being unloaded. It was filled with boxes of bare-root orchids. Each box must have had 200 orchids in it, and there were over 100 boxes, I'm sure. They had all come from Thailand. So, not all of the mass-grow orchid operations get their wholesale stock from US sources either.
When a US grower can employ 10 people at $7.50/hr and a Thai grower can employ 100 people at 75 cents/hr. who's going to be able to grow more orchids? We need to buy from the US grower to keep our money in this country even though his orchids are a bit more expensive. Not that many people are willing to do that.
