Comment by elil17
10 days ago
Why would they destroy the clothes instead of selling them to consumers? Developing countries already have huge markets for selling, altering, and repairing second-hand clothing that gets sent by thrift shops in developed countries.
If anything this would be displacing lower quality used clothing (often graphic t-shirts) that currently makes up a large part of the textile markets in developing nations.
Because at some point it becomes cheaper to ship and destroy than to store and sell.
Inventory is "dead money" in accounting books!
Money has been converted to Obtainium and Obtainium just sits there until it is converted back to (hopefully more) money, taking valuable space that could be filled with more Obtainium as soon as it goes away.
At some point that Obtainium sitting there unsold just becomes un-space and destroying it becomes the cheapest move.
But what about ship and sell? That's what I'm talking about. Storage is very cheap in developing countries.
My hope for more reasonable pricing so they sell all units is then perhaps naive?
The kind of clothes we're talking about are not regular clothes. It's the unsellable kind. When H&M is doing a big sale, order the clothes by price, lowest price first. You will find stuff so hideous that they can't even sell it for four bucks. That's what I would expect most of the disposed clothing to look like.
Then maybe this will make it more expensive for them to do that (which would be good because it's a bad thing to have been doing)