Top Flight Paper CEO George Robinson proved an eloquent advocate for his company and industry. The outfit is located in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where its factory employs 150 people, some of them for decades. It's a family-run business, too: CEO George is the grandson of one of the men who founded the company in 1920, H.T. Robinson.

"I've been working at the company since I was 15 years old. Today, I work with my father, my uncle and three of my first cousins, as well as over 150 Chattanooga area residents," he told the ITC last year.

And yet, it didn't seem like they were going to have much of a choice back a few years ago.

"In 2005 I lost several of my largest orders to dumped and subsidized products from India and China. These losses forced Top Flight to lay off 15 percent of its workforce, many of whom I worked with as a teenager," Robinson said. "Given these circumstances, in July of 2005 Top Flight was considering shutting down domestically and relocating some or all of its manufacturing offshore. We were simply at a loss for how to solve the dilemma that we were facing -- sharply declining volumes, sharply declining employment, profits -- all resulting from unfairly priced imports. At the time we were losing bids by such margins that the winning price was below our manufacturing price. Because of the declines in our company's performance, our primary lender asked us to find a new bank."

And yet, Robinson couldn't find it in himself to blame the retailers, who themselves have remarkably slim margins.

"That's their job," he said. "Get the lowest price they can. It doesn't matter if it's George from Top Flight or if it is the Indonesians or the Indians or the Chinese."

The dynamics of back-to-school retail are difficult to get around. The retailers desperately need to drive foot traffic because it's basically a second Christmas for them. They need good back-to-school sales or they'll never make their third-quarter numbers.

"The market condition is that this product is central to the education of our kids, certain lined paper school supplies. This is what the kids use in the classroom. These items are the items that are used for note taking, for preparing handwritten notices and that sort of thing. It is vitally important to just about every family that has children," Robinson explained. "And so it has been determined as being one of the most -- if not the most -- promotional event of the year, second only to Christmas, for large U.S. retailers. It creates an incredibly intensive price negotiation in order to minimize the loss because that's what they're doing. They're looking at am I going to lose 30 cents? Am I going to lose 35 cents? And when they're selling millions -- in some cases hundreds of millions -- of units of certain lined goods in a matter of three weeks it is ruthless competition, and we all participate in that competition, in that competitive market."