How a Baltimore company that specialized in making metal bagel baskets decided to make a big change to save itself:
“Within five years of buying Marlin, Greenblatt was getting killed. Chinese factories suddenly started making bagel baskets. Marlin sold its baskets for $12 apiece and with 36 baskets to equip a typical bagel shop made $450 when a company added a location. Chinese factories were selling baskets for $6 each. Marlin’s customers were switching to save $200 a store. And Marlin would never be able to match its Chinese competitors on price. ‘My steel was costing me $7 a basket,’ says Greenblatt. ‘We were going to go extinct.’ It would have been smarter for him to buy bagel baskets from China for $6 each and sell them for $6.50.”
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