HN users should be wary of cheap clothing the same way they are of free online services.
They cut those costs somewhere.
They cut those costs somewhere.
The fault lies not in reducing costs per se. Rather, it lies in reducing costs in an inhuman, inhumane, stupid and mean fashion: by abusing weaker people rather than by creating smarter solutions. In the long term, the latter will win. However, that does not help those poor souls caught in the former trap.
Lower costs are a noble objective. Lower costs through any means, however, are an abomination.
Agreed.
People have the causation backwards. Lower prices stem from lower costs which come from use of less resources (natural or productive) which means that there is more produced stuff out there. Increasing costs is the best way to increase prices and induce smaller supplies of produced goods.
I think companies like Abercrombie & Fitch are feeling the hurt as a result of this.
I'm sure there are ways of making a point to companies on both the long and short tail of fashion/clothing, though.
Update: I tried to search for a couple of minutes for more responsible brands, apparently New Balance makes some of their shoes in the US: http://www.zappos.com/search/made+in+usa/filter/productTypeF...
If a no name brand starts to make quality t-shirts, no one will know about it, and no shops will stock it, because the margins will be too low and the marketing will have too little budget.
If it takes $1 to make a shitty $15 shirt, and $15 to make a proper shirt, what will you charge for the proper quality shirt? How will you market it?
The end result is that they're marketed as super high quality only available for the sort of person that can afford to spend $100 on a basic shirt, just to compensate for the decreased margin and decreased demand.
The solution would have to be that these kinds of brands need to be ran by charities, with such low margins that no one gets rich of it. You need someone to splurge a couple million to buy a factory in India, and then increase wages and conditions until you make 0 profit.
Is it true that the only way to run capitalism humanely, is to have capitalists surrender their money?
If we would force India to also enforce those conditions, all we would do is make their factories unattractive, and business would move to another country.
Solving that, would perhaps require legislation to ban clothing (et al.) companies from using offshore factories that are not under close scrutiny of our own government. But perhaps that will just make our brands like H&M unattractive to more liberal countries like the U.S.
> But I also imagine that refusing to buy such goods would do no good to said children. You are assuming children are getting paid. they are not most of the time.