Watch the video!
Posted on 10/26/2012 11:59:57 AM PDT by Lorianne
Next stop, Mumbai!
Manufacturing garments at tiny margins for big US retailers is hard, painstaking work.
Not one in ten-thousand Americans would be willing to do the work, even at wages better than minimum-wage salary. And welfare, SNAP, free phones, etc.... assure that.
Having the world’s reserve currency has allowed America to avoid making choices, and has allowed Americans from making even more difficult adjustments. This trend will remain in place until the FED and the US Gov’t destroy the currency.
Globalism is why we have disintegrating clothing. My wife claims that most of her blouses last at most 2 washes. These aren't inexpensive junk. She buys mid-market labels like Liz and Alfred Dunner. There also are no size standards anymore, at least for women. Every single top in her closet is a different size.
On the other hand, I buy a lot of stuff at surplus stores. Most of my dress shirts were made for the USN thirty years ago. They still come out of the wash crisp, sharp and blinding white. If they ever wear out, I'll get some shirts made. Pants are trickier, but if you look hard you can still find ones made in the USA.
A much smaller educated workforce.
As long as there is cheap labor somewhere the garment industry has little incentive to be innovative in the manufacture of clothing. Someone sitting at a sewing machine stitching pieces of cloth today is not much different than it was a hundred years past.
Compare the garment industry with labor intensive farm harvesting. More and more machines are being developed to reduce the labor and thus costs of harvesting of grapes, nuts, lettuce, tomatoes etc. just as corn and wheat harvests became mechanized.
But in garment production the way to reduce costs is simply reduce wages by moving to lower wage countries, a process that has it’s obvious limits, instead of changing how its product is made.
So I would say one effect of cheap labor is that innovation in the garment industry has been stifled and hurt U.S workers at the same time.
That neo-Luddite argument has been proven false, many, many times.
Watch the video!
Final stop: back in the USA, when robotic systems finally can produce a shirt for less money than it costs to feed a Third World peasant.
At which point the Third World peasants starve to death.
It's actually poor quality control on the part of the US company. As cotton prices and Chinese labor costs have gone up over the last couple of years, we've been seeing the American companies switching to "cheaper" factories in China (and there are so many, there is always a lower cost option) to try to hold costs down. The result is a big mess - garments that look like their patterns were made (and probably were) by first year students, terrible problems with fit, poor-quality fabrics on the finished product that don't match what we saw at the trade shows, and uneven sewing. The US companies, of course, try to deny that anything is wrong - but in the fashion business, one bad season and you are DONE. Nobody gives you a second chance.
The proper solution is for the US labels to stick with the better factories and pass the higher costs along to the retailer and consumer (The Obama Premium?), but they won't do that. The market behavior of the majority of Americans has proven convincingly that when it comes to apparel, price is the only thing that matters.
Yep
So why is it that the Philippines have three “p’s”, but Filipina only has one?
I check the labels and don't buy anything made in VN or a Mooze Lame country. It takes a while, but you can find plenty of clothes made in India, the Philippines, and so on.
The things from India always seem better made and fit the way you expect them to based on the stated size. That may vary by brand but in my experience if you get shirt that fits and one that doesn't both from the same company, they'll be made in different places.
My family has to decide how much to spend on food, how much to spend on entertainment, how much to spend on new clothing. If more is spent on one less is spent on another.
If I spent $100-$150 on a pair of U.S. made Levis I'll have to decide what the family will give up in return.
Families with children see clothes outgrown before the clothes wear out so buying something cheaper only makes sense.
The real answer is not passing along costs to a retailer who can find another supplier or to a consumer who can find another retailer but reducing costs by reducing labor imparts to the final product since the price of raw materials isn't likely to drop dramatically.
Not cheaper labor but less labor.
Well, clothes have to be designed and the patterns have to be made by people who know what they are doing. That part of the labor equation is practically irreducible - but US importers are trying to get away with reducing it, anyway. Thus, the major quality problems we see these days at all of the chain stores.
The labor costs for the actual sewing are almost irrelevant - but if you mess up the design, you mess up your reputation.
Alternatively, they can find one good design and produce it exactly the same way year after year with no changes. Men won't care - women will freak out. :)
The Levi's you mention are an example of this. You can probably find a pair of excellent Chinese-made jeans every bit as good as the Levi's for a US retail price of around $50. Or you can get a poor-to-mediocre pair of Chinese-made jeans for $25. Or a horrible pair of ill-fitting Chinese-made jeans for $12. People who buy the $50 jeans might be doing their family budget a big favor - people who buy the $12 jeans most definitely are not - for they will have to be replaced almost immediately. Yet we see the American consumer continually gravitating toward the $12 jeans at stores like H&M and Target - because our disposable culture has never trained them to appreciate the value of quality.
I don’t buy Levi’s, aside from the fit, I never liked their pro-homosexual agenda activism.
How do Wranglers/Rustlers fit into your description?
"Made in the USA" really doesn't guarantee "high quality" any more. As often as not it really means: "Made in a sweatshop in L.A. by illegal aliens." Consumers need to think about exactly what behavior is being rewarded when insisting on "Made in the USA" or remaining loyal to a brand with slipping quality.
If I buy a decent quality dress shirt it'll cost me $50. The cloth in it doesn't cost that much so everything over the raw materials cost is labor and markup. The one area that seems most available to reduction is labor, labor which is being done as it was a hundred years ago.
The process of making clothes is outdated and only mechanization can make it profitable in the U.S.
Yes, there are high end specialty makers but the average person cannot afford them. And most of us don't wear the latest expensive designs anyway but low end imitations of them.
Going to a low wage country may lower costs for a while but as countries develop they don't want to be low wage anymore and if the U.S. worker doesn't have a job even cheap goods may be out of reach.
I buy Wranglers for the fit, and I like that they only cost about $12.00.
I don’t think they are made in America. I like them.
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