Comment by yason
10 days ago
What's wrong with clothing manufacture, commerce and trade, and fashion that brand-new clothing can be just trashed and destroyed?
The industrial process (and, to add, global economy relying on slave-cheap labour in a far enough country) has become effective enough that it literally costs less to make surplus items than to scrap them. Not exactly the level of cost in duplicating copyrighted bits but low enough that the sales effort to find buyers for the clothes after the season is more expensive than the profits from it. Often the price of items doesn't even warrant paying for returns: many online shops just tell you to keep the product if you claim a defective product and want your money back.
But you can't entirely blame the clothing markets alone: when it comes to cheap items any reasonable business would source a bit extra in the hopes of selling more. If you source fewer items than what will sell you'll be losing money. Given the profit margins it makes sense to just source X percent extra and calculate that it's cheaper to pay for them but not sell, rather than pay for too few and limit your profits by running out of stock. It's like insuring yourself by taking a slice of your profits today to prevent a rainy day from happening.
Us consumers of the modern commercial wonders are not without guilt either. We support this by buying new, crap quality garments that last only so long we'll soon be buying more. The price is low but the value is even lower, and that's the profit of the clothing industry. Buying new again and again is what enables the industry to operate. You can still have your clothes handmade by a tailor with lasting quality and for prices astronomical enough that you'll surely won't be (nor afford to) throwing them out too soon. Few people choose to do that, of course.
The exact same thing is happening on varying scales in: consumer electronics, appliances, cars, houses...
"...it literally costs less to make surplus items than to scrap them."
Right, my rhetorical point somewhat expanded here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47031527
"But you can't entirely blame the clothing markets..."
Nor stupid consumers, but watering down blame will weaken resolve to fix the problem. Perhaps it should become fashionable to criticize those who buy too many clothes by asking "do you really need that item?". Criticizing and ostracizing works, it greatly reduced cigarette smoking.
It's far easier to ostracize cigarette smokers (because you can see them smoke). You don't really know how many clothes somebody has unless you really pay attention to them, and nobody does.
There are multiple ways to tackle the problem, once we had competitions such as 'Miss World', 'Miss America', etc. that were popular but which now are very much seen as sexist.
The message would soon get across if being seen browsing in a clothing store wasn't the best look (like being seen in a porn shop is embarrassing). Or imagine the impact it were embarrassing to be seen at a fashion show or buying fashion magazines. Throughout history there have been bigger changes in social attitudes than that.
A rowdy mob picketing a few fashion shows would attract world attention to the problem.
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