I make efforts to buy American-made products, although it’s not always possible to do. I’ve certain rules though, such as not buying products from Nike, Coke or Adidas – extremely woke companies who take advantage of the people manufacturing their products, and ultimately, their customers.

At my company, employees like to wear products with our company name on it –  shirts, hoodies and sweaters. I had to create a policy our company name cannot appear on any Nike or Adidas products.

With that in mind, I was mortified when the grandkids were over for Christmas and I saw not one, but three new pairs of Nike sneakers opened. The wife bought them because they were on the kid’s Christmas list. I looked on in dismay as the kids squealed with delight, not knowing the back story. I’d rather they asked for an elephant.

The hypocrisy and wokeness of Nike are colossal. They seem to come down on the wrong side of every issue, at least from a conservative perspective.  

In a great marketing ploy, they used Michael Jordan for its poster child, selling a gazillion pairs of sneakers. Jordan’s use of Nike sneakers were against NBA policies at the time, costing him $5,000 per game. Nike gladly picked up Michael’s fines. Suppose those costs went into the price of the shoes?

As for Nike’s wokeness –  they came out in support of quarterback Colin Kaepernick with his absurd kneeling during our national anthem. Kaepernick was ushered out of the NFL for his grandstanding, but not after creating havoc for the woke NFL and their mostly not-woke fans. The geniuses at Nike even came out with a slogan for Kap – “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.” Perhaps Kap should have kept his opinions to himself when he was getting an obscene amount of money for playing a game.  

Nike took sides in the death of the felonious drug user George Floyd, which did not help in settling the racial hysteria that gripped the country with riots. Nike issued an Instagram post urging people not to “turn your back on racism” and instead “be part of the change.”

Not surprisingly, Nike was also on the wrong side of the transgender issue with men playing in women’s sports. This angered Jennifer Sey, a former US gymnastics champion and founder of XX-XY Athletics. A force to be reckoned with, she has deemed Nike has public enemy number one.  

Note to Nike – Conservatives wear sneakers too. As a corporation selling to all people of every hue, perhaps Nike should have stayed neutral on various societal matters, rather than adding their two cents of political wokeness to liberal policies that historians will laugh at one day.

About Nike’s hypocrisy:

The world’s largest manufacturer of sneakers is the Yue Yuen plant in China. For decades, they have been paying employees $1.67 per hour to make Nike shoes.  Workers labor six days a week, thirteen-and-a-half hours per day. There are fifteen Nike plants in China. Salaries today average about $570 per month. In defense of Nike –  if there is any –  other popular retailers like Adidas, LL Bean, Vans, ELLE, Land’s End, 5.11 and Dicks Sporting Goods also get their sneakers from some of the same plants in China making Nike shoes and apparel.   

Of late, workers have united and are involved in work stoppages. Sneaker retailers countered this by switching their orders to other plants in Viet Nam and Indonesia.

A pair of Nike’s starts at $40 and goes up to $500 in some cases. The most expensive shoes they made was for the rapper Drake, a $2.1 million solid gold shoe…that he can’t wear.A pair of 1984 game worn Jordan shoes went for over $1 million recently at an auction. Wonder how they smelled. Then, the shoes his Air-Ness wore  in game 5 of the 1997 NBA finals, known as “the flu game,” due to Michael’s giant belly ache, went for $104,000. Which is more ridiculous, somebody would want a pair of sneakers worn by a man with the flu, or that someone paid $104,000 for them.

Nike’s reputation is faltering somewhat though, experiencing a 10% revenue drop and a 30% dive in its stock price, possibly to negative reaction from the Olympics. In response to these various issues, there was a proposal by Nike to address human rights violations. Their board voted it down!

Need sneakers, folks – Reebok and New Balance are made here in the USA.