> Enrique Diaz-Alvarez wrote:
>
> > This is utter bullshit. I buy my US-made jeans for under $15 at Kmart.
> > . . . By contrast, the horrendously overpriced garbage at Gap and like
> > stores is all made in the Third World. I am not an expert, but it
> > seems to me that manufacturing labor cost must be a fairly tiny part
> > of the price of a $60 pair of Gap jeans.
>
> I think this might be a misleading comparison. I'm pretty sure K-Mart
> pants are mainly machine made, which is where you'd expect the advanced
> countries to have an advantage. But Gap and Old Navy pants visibly
> involve a lot more labor. You can certainly argue that it's useless labor
> from a utilitarian point of view, and that we as a people have been
> maddened by advertising, but it's clear that people will pay much more for
> those marks of distinction that take so much more labor (i.e., pockets on
> your ankle and zippers to nowhere). And while I think you're certainly
> right that labor is a minority of the cost of a pair of Old Navy jeans, I
> think that's in large part because the labor employed in making them is so
> cheap -- that the labor cost wouldn't be such a small part of the price of
> such high-labor pants if they were made here.
I really don't know that much about the textile industry. I was just bringing up that prices of clothes appear to bear fairly little relationship to the labor costs of the country they were made in. Marketing and product placement seem to be far more important determinants. Consumer Reports did a study on the durability of casual dress pants, and it turned out to be completely independent of price. Do you think that the factor of two price difference between Old Navy and Gap (owned by the same company, I think) is justified in any way by the amount of labor involved in making the clothes?
But I really don't know what the difference in necessary labor is between Gap and Kmart clothing, so I am sort of winging it. I doesn't seem all that great to me, though. Furthermore, nearly all clothes in Spain were made domestically till very recently, and the prices were no higher than in the US.
And then there's Nike...
BTW, I like nice stuff; I just don't like to pay for TV ads.
-- Enrique Diaz-Alvarez Office # (607) 255 5034 Electrical Engineering Home # (607) 272 4808 112 Phillips Hall Fax # (607) 255 4565 Cornell University mailto:enrique at ee.cornell.edu Ithaca, NY 14853 http://peta.ee.cornell.edu/~enrique