What are the opening hours?

Monday 9am - 5pm Tuesday 9am - 5pm Wednesday 9am - 5pm Thursday 9am - 5pm Friday 9am - 5pm

Blue Jeans Cable, 3216 16th Avenue W, Seattle, WA (2026)

03/19/2026

Blue Jeans Cable is hiring! We have a need for a full-time customer service rep/cable tech and for one or two part-time cable assemblers -- the latter being a great job for college students and the like, as we are very flexible on scheduling. PM us here if you live in the Seattle area and are interested in details...

12/30/2025

Good news for our Illinois customers: due to changes in state law, starting January 1, Blue Jeans Cable will no longer be obligated to collect Illinois sales tax. Sales through Amazon in IL will remain taxable, but sales through our website will not.

This is a topic about which a lot of customers -- not just in Illinois -- have asked, and about which there's been quite a bit of confusion. Blue Jeans Cable has essentially no physical presence anywhere in the USA other than Seattle, Washington -- so why do we charge sales tax in about twenty states?

Well, back in 2018, the US Supreme Court upset a long-standing precedent on the authority of states to impose sales tax on out-of-state vendors. For a long while, those taxes were unenforceable because a traditional reading of the Interstate Commerce clause of the US Constitution prohibited states from regulating commerce between the states, and that meant that practices of states which burdened interstate commerce were frequently -- not universally, but frequently -- unlawful. This included imposition of sales tax collection obligations on sellers who lacked a physical presence in the state to which the goods were shipped.

States didn't like this, of course. Theoretically the obligation to collect and remit the tax still existed, but was placed on the local buyer of goods -- but in practical terms that was seldom enforceable due to the states' lack of access to the relevant information and the small size of most such obligations. And states pushed, in a variety of ways, to open the floodgates. California was particularly aggressive on the point, and used to send letters to out of state vendors trying to bluff them into collecting taxes they had no obligation to collect.

But then came the Wayfair case before the US Supreme Court. It's a complicated subject and parts of the governing law remain unclear due to a rather nebulous decision, but in essence the Supreme Court held that a state could set reasonable thresholds for the tax-collection obligation upon out of state sellers, and that if those thresholds were indeed legally reasonable, those sellers could be obligated to collect and remit state sales taxes. Many states imposed such thresholds in the aftermath of Wayfair, often at the level of $100,000 in annual sales and/or 200 annual transactions. We meet thresholds in a variety of states, and additional wrinkles come into it as well -- many states contend (incorrectly, we believe, but who wants to litigate?) that the mere presence of inventory in a third party's hands (read: Amazon fulfillment warehouses) in the state constitutes a "physical presence" giving rise to sales tax nexus, even if the seller has no control over the location of that inventory or access to it other than the right to demand it be shipped back.

Who to blame? Kennedy, Thomas, Ginsburg, Alito and Gorsuch are responsible for the mess, while Breyer, Roberts, Sotomayor and Kagan dissented. The majority were persuaded by, among other things, self-serving amicus briefs by companies which sell sales tax compliance services; those companies assured the Court that sales tax compliance would be really easy and would cost next to nothing, "because software." Software which, conveniently, they sell at a price quite a bit higher than anything they suggested to the Court. Of course, actually implementing sales tax calculation and filing systems is a hideous mess, fraught with all manner of difficulty, and it is now a regular monthly ritual here, with BJC collecting and filing sales taxes in about twenty states. And that software? Well, we don't use it; it would be wrong, in our view, to reward the companies that aimed this particular bazooka at small business, and so we have had to build our own compliance systems.

Illinois, thank goodness, after being one of the most complicated states for sales tax compliance, has done something downright sensible. It eliminated the 200-transaction threshold (we were hitting that, but not the $100K threshold) and it clarified its stance on "physical presence" by declaring Amazon inventory, in most cases, irrelevant to physical presence. Illinois residents will still pay sales tax on a lot of out-of-state purchases, but as of January 1, not on purchases from our website.

If you don't live in Illinois but have the ear of a local legislator, this isn't a bad topic to raise. Sales tax compliance is relatively easy for huge companies with legions of accountants, but it's a real hardship for smaller businesses like ours. After Wayfair, it may be unreasonable to expect a state to give up the idea of collecting from very large vendors like Amazon, but lifting that burden from businesses of more modest size doesn't actually cost states that much (if anything at all -- on small accounts, administration can cost as much as the taxes that are collected).

09/30/2025

Most of our stock, of course, is composed of things people regularly want: RCA, XLR, HDMI, Ethernet and speaker cables of various sorts, particularly.

And then there are some odd bits which sell slowly, like s-video cable. Yes, people still want it. No, they don't want very much of it.

But here and there we have something that seems to have passed beyond human memory. Consider Belden 8281.

If you were building a television station, ages ago, you probably needed a great big shipment of 8281 to hook everything up. It's a 75 ohm video coax, used for routing video signals between devices around production facilities -- good for analog composite video, analog RGB signal types, and even for standard-def SDI. But we've had about 2000 feet of it in the "walrus room" down in our basement for a decade or more, and it's not apparently going anywhere any time soon.

8281: the cable time forgot. Why did something like this go from being so very, very common to being nearly non-existent? A few things.

First, it's big and stiff. It's an RG-59 cable, but you wouldn't know it to look at it, because it's significantly bigger than any modern RG-6. That's because it has a solid polyethylene dielectric; solid PE has a much higher dielectric constant than foamed PE (which, ceteris paribus, is a bad thing), but used to be de rigueur for high quality video cable because of the superb impedance consistency of solid-PE dielectric cable. Modern foamed PE is so good, though, that this is no longer an advantage.

Second, fire. The outer jacket of 8281 is polyethylene, just like the dielectric. After a few disastrous telephone-exchange fires decades ago, in which inhalation of fumes from burning PE caused serious medical problems for firefighters, electrical codes were updated to require less burnable jackets. Most similar cable today is jacketed in PVC; it's slower to burn (one cable company rep said to us one day that PE "burns like a candle") and that means slower fire spread and lower likelihood of large amounts of toxic fumes. Today, you can still use 8281, but you can't install it in walls or risers, so it's fairly useless as a facility cable.

So if you are a fancier of classic video gear, and are out there figuring out how to wire up your desk-sized Ampex 2-inch deck, give us a shout. We've still got the stuff. We're not entirely sure anyone else, anywhere, does.

09/25/2025

Back in 2014, after years of paying ever-increasing commercial rents in Seattle, we found a building to buy, and have been happily building cable assemblies here ever since. The building includes an underground concrete vault of sorts, on top of which we park our cars; when we first looked at the building it was still occupied by the former owner, who had boxes and boxes of animal bones, including quite a few walrus skulls, stored there. We therefore named it the "walrus room," and it is now where various odds and ends are kept -- and this beast, which we sometimes call the walrus, as it has a certain massiveness about it.

What is it? It's a Curtis air compressor, made in St. Louis, MO, and it's lived in this building for a good long while -- likely since about 1970 when our building was built.

It's handy that we do have that concrete vault, because, well, you don't want to be in the middle of a conversation next to this thing when it switches on. In our old shop, we also needed a lot of compressed air, but we used little compressors -- special quiet models made for dental offices -- so that the noise wouldn't drown out the telephones. But the vault gives us enough sound isolation from this thing that it can make all the noise it wants.

Coming as we did from law practice and IT work, we had no idea how useful compressed air was until we got into the cable business. All we knew it was good for was to enable auto mechanics to over-torque lug nuts so that you can't change a flat by the side of the road unless you happen to have Hercules riding shotgun. But pneumatic tools are all over the shop; our crimp presses all run on compressed air, and the ultrasonic welders use it, too -- in order to get a good weld you've got to compress and immobilize the material being welded. And then there are odd and surprising bits -- our Schleuniger cable coiler, used for coiling up long cables when they come out of a measure-and-cut machine, also does most of its work with compressed air. We do also have an air wrench, in case we want to disassemble a spool or reminisce about the tightest a mechanic has ever over-torqued our lug nuts (that would be on the Studebaker, where a young whippersnapper had no idea what the letter "L" in the middle of the lug means, and so could not figure out why the things wouldn't turn. Didn't know you could strip the threads clean off of the lugs with enough air-wrench, but it turns out you can!)

If you have any of our LC-1 or LC-2 audio cables, or our ultrasonically-welded speaker cables, chances are that the "walrus" was the muscle that helped put them together. But it comes in handy for something else, too. Every time someone tells us that manufacturing in America is dead, we walk into the walrus room, fire up the Curtis walrus, and then, you know what? We can't hear them any longer. This bu**er is loud.

08/25/2025

We were delighted to see a favorable mention in this month's issue of The Absolute Sound for our Ethernet cables. As Absolute Sound readers are often shopping at prices which are stratospheric compared to ours, we do hope that some of them find some real value in the down-to-earth nature of what we do. (Or, perhaps, since the author of the piece recommended an unshielded rather than a shielded Ethernet cable, the not-so-down-to-earth nature of what we do.)

Music streaming is of course huge today; one can't go to an audio show without being presented with a dizzying assortment of DACs and related gear. And while some people's wi-fi networks are fast and stable, there's still nothing like a wired connection made with a spec-compliant Ethernet cable to get data from point to point without a fuss.

We first became involved in Ethernet cable some years ago when, after hearing it said that 80% of patch cords on the market failed their stated specifications, we decided to check that out ourselves. And in testing cables from an assortment of the most popular online retailers, that's exactly what we found: 16 of 20 cables we tested failed their stated Cat 6 or Cat 6A specs, and about half also failed the much easier Cat 5e specification.

The frequent saying on this is, of course, that it is only ones and zeros. In Ethernet protocols that's literally not true, because all popular Ethernet protocols actually use multilevel encoding with more voltage levels than "one" and "zero" in order to keep the signal bandwidth down. But worse than that is the fact that "digital" signals in the real world are annoyingly analog-like. We all know a one from a zero, and we can tell on from off, and so if we learn a bit of radio morse, we can listen to a string of code and render it as letters. But imagine that the "on" is not fully on, nor the "off" fully off, and that the timing may sometimes be a bit out of whack -- that's what return loss and crosstalk do to signals in Ethernet cables, and it makes the receiving circuit's job harder.

Note that we said "harder," not necessarily "difficult." At low levels of RL and crosstalk, it's pretty clear what the signal content is and if that's the case, all is well. If that's not the case, and the levels of loss DO make the task difficult, you start getting dropped packets, and that's where the world of streaming gets to be a bit different from the world of e-mail or web access. Why? It's all about latency.

If we e-mail you a price quote, and you go to read that quote, your computer has to get the e-mail from the server. Do you know whether it got through correctly the first time, or whether it suffered packet loss on the way? No, and the reason you don't is that unless data losses are really severe, you'd never notice the difference. What difference does it make whether the quote shows up in one second, or in one hundredth of a second? Applications like that are very forgiving -- the network can be performing pretty badly, but if the network isn't clogged up with traffic and the losses aren't really severe, it's entirely likely that nobody will notice when pushing files or correspondence around.

But streaming applications involve a time element which typical e-mail correspondence does not. If video or audio transmission suffers some packet loss, the re-sent data had better get there in time to correctly reproduce the stream, or there will be a hiccup -- so the receiving device needs to let the sender know, and the sender needs to resend in time. If it doesn't, depending on the specific applications used, this might show up a variety of ways: the dreaded "buffering" message, or intermittent stops, starts or pops being the most likely.

Now, we see "audiophile" Ethernet cables being promoted here and there for thousands of dollars. We don't see the point of that at all. Once reception of the signal is already good enough for it to be reproduced accurately and on time, there's really no room left for improvement. Some of those cables certainly LOOK fancy. They often have snazzier-looking connectors, though our own experience has been that snazzy-looking Ethernet connectors generally perform no better (and sometimes worse!) than their more pedestrian counterparts.

Might a two-dollar Ethernet cable be doing everything it needs to do for your streaming? It certainly might. We would be fools to say otherwise. But we also know that when we test those cables against the industry-standard TIA and ISO specifications, a lot of them fail; whether that leads to degradation in any particular application will depend on how bad the cable is, and upon other factors beyond wire and cable performance. And, please note: the TIA and ISO specifications are performance specs, based upon sophisticated electronic testing, not simple physical specs along the lines of "extrude this much insulation over this many wires and twist like so." You can't look at a cable and know whether it is compliant -- and that's true even if you know that the bulk cable and the connectors used are all compliant.

We'd never recommend buying a thousand-dollar Ethernet cable. But there definitely are places, especially in audio and video streaming, where a cable that costs less than twenty bucks will outperform that two-dollar cable, and where that better performance will actually matter. If you may be in that place, well, we've got the stuff. Every Ethernet cable we sell is tested on a certification tester (note: not a mere "qualification tester"), and is tested against the applicable patch cord standard (note: not the much easier, and inapplicable, "channel" standard). If it doesn't pass, we won't ship it.

07/31/2025

New Ethernet cables at BJC:

We've been known for quality Ethernet cables for a number of years. In a market where 80% of cables sold at retail fail to meet the specifications for their designated category, we test every last one of our Ethernet cables, whether Cat 5e, 6 or 6A, on a certification tester to ensure spec compliance. And yes, that's a certification tester, not a qualification tester; we are testing against the patch cord standard, not against the commonly-tested, inapplicable, and much easier channel standard.

For years now, all of our Ethernet patch cord stocks have been made by Belden. Today we are adding a new line of Cat 6 and 6A cables using cable stock made in Ware, Massachusetts by Quabbin Wire & Cable, a company known for its high quality and consistency of manufacture. As always, though we don't make the bulk cable ourselves, the cable is terminated and tested here in our Seattle shop, using Sentinel connectors from York, Pennsylvania.

The Quabbin 6A cable we've added is spec-compliant whether the shield is grounded or not; accordingly, we are now able to offer 6A patch cords either in shielded or unshielded configuration. Which to choose? It's pretty simple: if the rest of your network is unshielded, best to stay unshielded; but if if it's shielded, then shielded patchcords are the best choice.

We like to offer our cables in as many colors as possible (ideally, all ten resistor-code colors), but at the moment we are sort of in Henry Ford territory; you can have the 6A in any color you want, so long as it's blue. But we will be adding more colors over the coming months.

https://www.bluejeanscable.com/store/data-cables/index.htm

07/22/2025

Pricing update and tariffs:

We are seeing an ongoing wide-ranging round of price increases coming from nearly all of our suppliers, both foreign and domestic, coupled with substantial increases in the cost of our direct imports of custom connectors. The recent threat of a tariff on imported copper, meanwhile, though it has not gone into effect, has resulted in record high prices for copper which are beginning to be seen in the form of large price increases, especially from our domestic suppliers. Since nearly every single article of communications wire and cable (especially speaker wire!) has copper as its largest cost input, the impact across our whole range of goods is becoming quite substantial. Our margins have always been modest and we have no way to absorb these increased costs except through increased pricing.

We are just now beginning to reprice goods around these cost increases, as we are also just beginning to pay the substantially increased taxes on our imports. The situation remains extremely unpredictable, as the "deadline" for imposition of a 32% across-the-board tariff on those parts we import from Taiwan is said to be August 1, and even where countries have entered into arrangements with the US (today, the Phillippines) the terms have involved exceptionally high tariffs (19% in that case). Two large shipments of goods from Taiwan leave port in the last week of July and we have very little idea what these will cost us to receive.

We promise that we will do everything we can to contain the pricing impacts. It's a challenging time to be a domestic manufacturer of goods, with no certainty as to what our costs will be from day to day and with the considerable risks, in the face of wild and unpredictable fluctuations in tariffs, of getting caught buying goods at the wrong moment. To our customers we say: we appreciate your patronage and we hope that you will find yourselves able to stick with us as we weather the storm. No matter how bad the conditions for an American manufacturer become, we will stay the course and continue to build the highest-quality cable assemblies we know how to make, for prices which reflect real costs of manufacture rather than marketing puffery and smoke and mirrors.

And yes, we really do build them right here in Seattle. Apart from a few items (e.g., HDMI and DVI cables) which we import fully-manufactured, when you order a cable from us, we pull it from a spindle, measure, cut, end-prep, terminate and test it all in our own workshop. We know the product literally from the inside out, and what's more, we understand the technical and practical issues of communications cabling. It may be tempting, at times like this, to buy cheaper offshore goods -- especially as the tariff impacts upon them are, counterintuitively, usually smaller than the impacts upon us -- but we hope that you find value in our skill and expertise, which is always right here, ready to work for you.

07/09/2025

The Law of Unintended Consequences

Side effects are familiar enough in medicine -- you don't want to take a drug for one serious ailment if the consequence is simply to cause another serious ailment. And in the world of economics, too, there are side effects that can completely negate the intended benefits of a policy. We call these, simply, "unintended consequences."

High tariffs in the modern world are nearly extinct, for a variety of reasons. One principal reason is that tariffs are so frequently fraught with unintended consequences that they tend to be somewhat self-defeating. The great economist Milton Friedman regarded tariffs as so deleterious to one's economy that one should not even participate in a trade war -- because the harms to one's own economy from tariffs are almost always greater than any benefit. Let other countries harm their economies with tariffs, Friedman said; don't make the mistake of harming your own.

The other day, it was suggested that the United States may impose a 50% tariff on imported copper. The price of copper spiked, and stocks of domestic copper mining companies likewise. This certainly caught our attention, because the universal favorite conductor of communications cabling is copper. It's highly conductive, and, when properly annealed, highly flexible. Substitutes like aluminum and silver have significant drawbacks, so copper dominates the communications cable business. A little bit of tin and silver are used in plating on some products, aluminum shows up in foil shields and on the cheap braids on lower-quality coaxes, and silver conductors appear in a handful of specialty products, but copper is far and away the best and, consequently, most common material in communications cable.

The price of copper is enormously consequential for a business like ours, and for our customers. Copper is such a large factor in cable manufacturing cost that many wholesale price quotes in the industry aren't simply "X per 1,000 feet," but "X per 1,000 feet plus an adjustment factor based on the spot price of copper." Some products, such as speaker wire, contain so much copper relative to plastics or to other manufacturing costs that the end product pricing pretty much scales right along with the price of copper itself. So naturally anything which influences the price of copper is of significant concern to producers and consumers in this industry.

But, the protectionist argument has always gone: the benefits to domestic industry will outweigh the enormous cost to the consumer. And it might be that in a pure domestic resource extraction industry like copper mining, the benefits to the owners of mines are indeed huge. Whether those outweigh the enormous cost to the consumer is a political question loaded down with a lot of related questions about values (does the government have any business at all telling you who you can buy copper from, and on what terms? Those not averse to big government may say yes, but those more averse will say no.).

But set aside the pleasant scene of delighted mine owners, which surely brings a smile to the face of anyone whose loved ones own copper mines, for a moment. The mining industry isn't the only industry affected. Anyone who consumes copper -- the plumbing industry or the communications cabling industry, for example -- is also affected. And here's where the law of unintended consequences, refracted through the lens of the actual laws governing import and export, comes in.

When one imposes a tariff on a metal, that tariff applies to specific articles which are composed of, or principally of, that metal, and which are classified as such. There is an international classification system for goods, the Harmonized Tariff Schedule, and HTS Chapter 74 governs articles made of copper. Anything which falls under Chapter 74 would be swept in under a general 50% tariff on imported copper.

But there are a lot of articles with substantial copper content which are NOT classified under Chapter 74, and here's where the consequences get interesting. All types of communications cabling, of whatever metals they may be composed, are classified under Chapter 85. Under Chapter 85 there's no distinction made between articles made of copper and those made of other metals (or of no metal at all). And, of course, even if there were, it would be impractical to impose a 50% tariff on the copper content of those articles; Chapter 74 articles are always things composed principally of copper and copper alloys, but Chapter 85 articles which contain copper may contain anything from a negligible amount (e.g., coaxial cable with copper-coated steel conductors like most CATV drop cable) to a substantial amount (e.g., electrical contacts made of copper or brass). So Chapter 85 articles will miss the 50% tariff, while Chapter 74 articles will be subject to it.

Now, let's imagine that you are a large international firm with manufacturing facilities in many countries. Belden, for example, manufactures some cable in Mexico as well as in the USA. The Richmond, Indiana plant's wire-draw operations start with bulk copper rod -- a Chapter 74 article which will become much more expensive (both from domestic and foreign suppliers) with a 50% tariff. But when Belden draws the wire, strands it, extrudes dielectrics over it, combines conductors and extrudes a jacket over the whole thing, the product is a Chapter 85 article. Now, consider:

If you're a company like that, and you are wondering whether to import copper into the USA for cable manufacture or whether to send that copper to one of your non-US facilities for use, a 50% tariff on copper imports gives you an absolutely massive incentive to send those manufacturing jobs outside of the USA. Why? Well, if you import raw copper to your US cable factory, you pay a 50% tariff. If instead you take that copper to Mexico, no 50% tariff; and when the Mexican plant is done with the product, it's no longer a Chapter 74 article, but has been transformed into a Chapter 85 article, subject to much lower tariffs when it finally enters the USA. Anyone faced with that choice will readily see that the only sensible policy, under the tariff, is to move as much manufacturing as one can outside of the USA.

And, of course, this applies between companies as well. If you are a purely domestic producer of cable, you face huge increases in material costs which your foreign competitors do not face. And when those foreign goods come into the country, they are no longer Chapter 74 goods, but Chapter 85 goods, subject again to the lower applicable tariff rates. A 50% tariff on copper imports gives a massive -- perhaps entirely overwhelming -- competitive advantage to foreign producers of communications cable.

It may be that a fellow who owns a copper mine is absolutely delighted to have his foreign competitors put at a severe disadvantage by huge copper tariffs. But his delight will be offset, in the big picture, by substantial losses of jobs in domestic industries that transform bulk copper into goods no longer classified under Chapter 74.

Not everything, perhaps, is ideal about free markets; that's a political question which has been raging for a long time. But one of the things which free markets do avoid is the law of unintended consequences. The voluntary transactions between free people, unburdened by big government restrictions, produce a sensible market for goods and services where arbitrary distinctions like that between Chapter 74 and Chapter 85 goods simply have no impact at all. When we try to impose huge tax increases for the purpose of benefitting one group of people, we tend to inflict great injury upon other groups of people.

As with all such questions, the issue of whether that's good or not depends upon one's values. But whatever one's values, it's important to go in with eyes open. A 50% tariff will not just harm people like us and our customers, but will also hurt America's domestic bulk cable manufacturers and their many employees, handing a substantial unearned advantage to their foreign competitors. If there is an objective to be reached by this path, all we can say is that it had better be a very, very good one.

We are, of course, watching what happens next in copper. We always do, but never in our history has the potential for such a disruptive increase in copper prices presented itself. Obviously, if it comes the impact upon pricing will be immense, and the advantage handed to our foreign competitors will be similarly immense.

07/02/2025

A Tariff Update: Impacts on Pricing

We've written previously about the probable pricing impact of new tariffs on various bulk stocks of cables and connectors which we import either directly or indirectly (that is, where we are not the importer of record but we purchase from the importer). In the face of substantial uncertainty as to which of these tariffs would go into effect and which would not, we made the decision, on an interim basis, to simply hold pricing stable and eat the cost increases. Regrettably, that's no longer possible.

Most of our vendors have now imposed substantial price increases on our incoming goods, whether those goods are of foreign or domestic origin. Belden, in fact, which manufactures cable principally in the USA, was the first to come in with a large tariff-linked price increase -- as we've stressed before, practically all manufacturers these days have complex supply chains which means that domestic goods are often just as heavily affected as foreign goods -- indeed, sometimes more heavily -- by tariff increases.

We directly import our custom connectors of various sorts from Taiwan, a traditional ally of the United States from the Cold War forward. Some of our best friends in this industry are Taiwanese and we have long preferred to buy goods from from Taiwan rather than China -- our policy, as we have said before, is "Buy Free World," and we will always source goods from lands where workers have enforceable rights and where free enterprise is allowed to flourish, unless it is completely impractical to do so.

Today we were invoiced for duty on a recent small shipment of connectors from Taiwan. The value of the shipment was $41,224.00. The pre-existing duties on these goods, at rates we have been paying for many years, come to $1,038.66, with the various goods in the shipment being taxed at rates ranging from duty-free to 3%. But on top of that now is added an across-the-board duty of 10%, or $4,122.40: just barely under a 400% increase in our tax liability.

Now that most of our vendors have increased prices as a result of tariffs, and now that our own import costs are higher, we are having to give way to the inevitable. Our prices will have to increase. We have always been a company that tries to deliver quality goods at prices which reflect real costs of manufacture rather than at high markups reflecting marketing whimsy and puffery. But, that being the case, the substantial cost increases we face on all sides cannot be resisted any longer; our margins just don't allow it.

We can't give you a rate of price increase that's applicable overall; that's because some goods we buy still haven't increased in price, while others have increased substantially, and even within a single product type, the cost increases are not uniform. So, for example, a short speaker cable has as many connectors on it as a long one; the short cable's price is dominated by the connectors, and as the cable gets longer, the influence of the cost of the cable itself becomes stronger, so changes to pricing will wind up being somewhat length-dependent. At the moment it seems likely that nothing will go up, at least immediately, by more than 10%. But a few of our suppliers are still holding the line on pricing, eating dramatically higher import costs themselves, and they cannot be counted on to do that indefinitely. Unless there is a dramatic change in US trade policy, all of them will increase their prices substantially.

We never like to make large pricing moves without a heads-up, and so we are also announcing that, while these price increases are coming, we will do nothing to increase our pricing until at least Friday, July 11. On that day and thereafter, we will start to reprice our goods; most categories will be affected.

Please understand that neither the price increases themselves, nor this post, are intended as political commentary. One may draw from it whatever one will. Some people are convinced that there is some long-term benefit to this policy and others are convinced there is not. Just as we don't take political advice from show-business people (whether from Hollywood or from the rodeo), we don't expect you to get your politics from us, and so while we have strong opinions in the matter, we will say nothing about that. The point here is to relate simple facts which are not even remotely in the realm of political dispute: the increases to our costs, as an American manufacturer, are substantial, and those costs inevitably run to the consumer. That's true whether you believe it's a good thing or a bad thing.

We have found that when we do comment upon this issue, there are a few people who tell us that we ought to source our connectors from American manufacturers. We actually do, in the case of Ethernet -- our principal connectors are from Sentinel in York, PA. But the pickings are very, very slim for most audio connector types, if one looks to American manufacture. We do not know of a single RCA plug manufactured in the USA which is even close to being suitable for our use, for example. A lot of remaining American connector production is in legacy connector designs, some of which haven't been updated since the 1940s, and some of which need it very badly. And nobody is rushing, or is likely to soon be rushing, to fill that gap. If we used a lot of industrial circular multi-contact mil-spec connectors, the picture would be different; but we don't.

Meanwhile, on cable, as we've said, the company from which we have bought millions of dollars of US-made cable over the years, Belden, was among the first to announce substantial tariff-driven price increases. We do source a great deal of cable from the United States; but none of that is immune from tariff-driven price increases.

So please do understand: we always have favored domestic sources over foreign, but more importantly, free-world sources over non-free-world sources. We have always believed that we should trade with America's allies. Heck, even when sourcing a pallet jack, we turned down a load of Chinese models and paid more for one made in Canada. We buy Swiss cable processing machines that cost tens of thousands of dollars, rather than cheaper Chinese machines that do the same work; we'd rather see our money go to Swiss workers than Chinese oligarchs. We also have a few American cable processing machines, but most of the types we need aren't made in this country at all.

If we could solve these cost problems by slapping our foreheads and saying, "gosh, you know what? I'll buy American!" we'd be quite happy to do so. We can't. We do hope that you'll stick with us during these confusing times, and that US trade policy does not continue to move adversely to our business and to the prices we are able to offer our customers.

Blue Jeans Cable

03/19/2026

12/30/2025

09/30/2025

09/25/2025

08/25/2025

07/31/2025

07/22/2025

07/09/2025

07/02/2025

Address

Opening Hours

Telephone

Website

Alerts

Contact The Business

Shortcuts

Share

Monday	9am - 5pm
Tuesday	9am - 5pm
Wednesday	9am - 5pm
Thursday	9am - 5pm
Friday	9am - 5pm