Comment by overfeed
5 days ago
> I'm only criticizing the race to the bottom that the platforms and kind of consumption mentioned are part of.
You're going to (collectively) need to increase the incomes at the low-end if you want people earning minimum-wage to still be clothed and able to furnish their homes. A significant portion of people who by from Shein have no other options within their budgets, and their existence tends to be ignored in conversations such as this one. The unspoken social contract has been "You get low wages, but get access to cheap consumer goods", but now the cheap consumer goods are being taken away.
There's a dissonance between wanting American-made/substantive/good quality/expensive consumer goods and maintaining the minimum wage at unlivable levels to avoid knock-on inflation. You can't have the economics of Switzerland coexisting with McJobs.
There is no dissonance here, workers being put in competition with much cheaper ones on the other side of the planet is absolutely going to drive their wages down. They got 30 years of that... and many of us in Europe did too.
Wages may have to go higher at the lower end, but consumption also needs to change. Most of the price of "food" is packaging, transport and marketing, not farmers' wages. Here in France people buy on average 50 items of clothing a year, 50! The amount of items has increased by 50% in the last 15 years.