Are there any better choices for manufacturing stateside? From what I can tell, not only is manufacturing stateside much more difficult and expensive, often times factories don’t want small business.
I've worked in product development consulting for over a decade, and I wouldn't say stateside manufacturing is more difficult -- quite the opposite really for many of the reasons mentioned in other comments. There are plenty of small molding, machining, PCB, etc. shops across the country who would love to work on these kinds of low-volume jobs.
Cost and time are the killer, though. To manufacture a simple electronic product in the US could easily double the lead time compared to a Chinese manufacturer and tooling costs might be 2 to 10x. Per-part cost really depends on what it is you're making and how much hand assembly is required.
My industry is much more concerned with quality and predictability than cost, so choosing US (or European) manufacturers hasn't been a hard choice. But for consumer products, I'm not surprised that the math doesn't work out.
