That's Globalization, Baby

Sorry, I channeled Dick Vitale there for a second...
   For Christmas, my younger niece got me a polar bear toy that poops jelly beans. It's all good, because I got her a plush zombie that you can pull apart and put back together. The jelly beans are tasty, too, butterscotch and cola.
   But I noticed something as I was reading the package. The package comes from a distributor in Canada. Or at least from Quebec, which is part of Canada for the time being, I suppose. No biggie, I have no quarrel with Canada, except for them making Celine Dion our problem but I've let that go. I did notice something interesting, though.
   The polar bear itself - the plastic bit - comes from China. The jelly beans come from Ireland, of all places (who knew they had the jelly bean infrastructure?). And my niece bought the polar bear package, bear, beans and all, in San Antonio, Texas.
   So you have a silly little toy made in one corner of the world combined in Canada with candy made in another corner of the world, being sold in Texas. I posted recently about a Pepsi can made in England, but this is an even better example of how little national boundaries mean to modern business exigencies. All this effort, all this coordination, all this back and forth through four countries, all this blood, sweat, plastic, and sugar put into getting a candy-pooping polar bear into my hands at Christmas.
   Kind of makes you think, don't it? People want to 'buy American,' but if you do that the only thing you're assured of is the product is assembled in America, the bits might very well have come from other parts of the world.
   I wonder where my Gene Simmons ceramic bobble-head really came from?