Marketing

Customs Field Trip

On a recent trip to Customs with our textile class, I learned that U.S. Customs and Border Protections facilitate about $2 trillion in trade a year. They also enforce trade laws that protect the economy, the health and the safety of the American people. They accomplish this through close partnerships with the trade community, other government agencies and foreign governments. With this as their mission and in order to succeed they must preform two major jobs. First they secure the trade process from acts of terrorism and criminals. Secondly, they make sure that goods arriving into the United States are legitimate and that the appropriate duties and fees are paid. Customs is a huge operation that investigates all aspect of trade, this field trip mainly focused on the trade of apparel, footwear, textiles and accessories.

The first room my group experienced was where they analyzed the footwear, they specialized in open toe, athletic shoes, and boots. For all of the shoes, the forensic scientists took apart one of the shoes to inspect it throughly in and out. I learned that most footwear is either: leather, rubber, plastic, textiles, cardboard, cork and metal or a combination of these. Once the shoes are totally taken apart, the scientists indicate what material each part of the shoe is. After they weigh each type of material and then use the percentages to be able to determine what the shoe is mostly made of. A very interesting fact that I learned on this field trip was that if the shoe is made up mostly of rubber or plastic the company will have to pay much higher taxes. The taxes for textile or rubber is about four times as much as if the company made the shoe of mostly leather. I thought this was very surprising because most leather shoes are usually more expensive than plastic or rubber ones, so I automatically thought the taxes would be much higher. Our guide also told us a story of a company claiming that their athletic footwear was made up...