Another big box is a sorry excuse for economic development - even as much as I like Costco, and the way they actually pay their employees a real wage, it still isn't like having a manufacturing facility of the same square feet.
Reminds me of a high school economics lesson. Selling the raw materials doesn't make as much money as the company designing and selling the finished product. One example was cotton. You don't make a lot of money picking or selling the cotton compared to the company who designs and sells the cotton T-shirts for $15 or $50 each. It's that "value added" thing. Though not always true per say.
One example found online...
The Bangladeshi factory makes 125,000 shirts per day, of which half are sold to H&M, the rest to other western retailers. One worker at the factory, earned just 1.36 euros per day, based on a 10-12 hour day. The machine she works with produces a target of 250 T-shirts per hour.
About 95 cents covers labour costs, power costs, the cost of materials needed (other than cotton), depreciation of machinery and other items, plus a margin for the local manufacturer’s profit. A reasonable estimate would be that the average labour cost to produce one T-shirt is around 10-15 cents.[v] In that case, H&M’s profit margin is four to six times what is paid to the workers in Bangladesh making the T-shirts.
However, what is just as striking in the details is the fact that a large chunk of the revenue from the selling price 4.95 Euros, goes to the state in taxes and to a wide range of workers, executives, landlords and businesses in Germany.
Another example...
In the case of the iPhone 4, total supplies per unit, including flash memory and processing chips, are reported to have cost around $188, while labour assembly costs in China (at the infamous Foxconn factory) were less than $7 per unit.[ii] Yet the iPhone was retailing in the US at $600. The remaining $400 or so is ‘value added’ by Apple.