Cheap clothes: exploitation or sustainability?
A bright blue lined bomber jacket for $5. A toddler hoodie and sweatpants set for $3. Is it exploitation? Or signs of a growing circular economy?
Clothing is still all sewn by factory workers on industrial sewing machines. It’s difficult to automate because it requires a high degree of precision on an extremely pliable medium — fabric. So when there’s a really good deal in a store, it makes people wonder: why is it so cheap?
I went to Factory 2 U at Mission Street and 23rd, San Francisco, to find out. Factory 2 U filed for bankruptcy protection in 2004, and was purchased by National Stores. It’s part of a trend of low margins retail treading water — National Stores also purchased Weiner’s stores (in Houston), Conway Stores, and Anna’s Linens stores as the franchises were in various stages of bankruptcy. In 2018, National Stores itself filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, which means that it’s reorganizing the company to prevent going under.
But it’s now 2020, and this particular retail location is still going strong. With it’s $3 shirts and other unfathomably cheap clothing, it’s a good place to delve into how the cheap clothes industry works.
Inside, the walls proclaim BRANDS YOU LIKE AT PRICES YOU LOVE! $3 shirts, $4 sweaters, $10 jeans, and more fill the space.
But there’s some method to the madness. What’s strange about this rack of jean shorts?
At $5 they are unbelievably cheap. They are also all different — they couldn’t have been mass manufactured. What’s the deal?
Looking closer at the tags: some of them are blacked out, and some of them are large — large enough to cover a previous tag. In a quiet act of sustainability, a factory (usually overseas) has taken the time to purchase a lot of used jeans from the USA, remanufactured them into shorts, and shipped them back to be resold. This industry is much larger than you’d think: One billion TONS of ‘waste’ is reused or remixed into new goods every year.
When people donate their clothes, they like to think that there’s someone else in their neighborhood, or at least in their country, that’s going to put the clothes to good use. Adam Minter is the author of Secondhand, and has spent the past few years tracking down where used stuff goes. “Your average thrift store in the United States only sells about one-third of the stuff that ends up on its shelves,” he says. “The rest of the stuff ends up somewhere else.” (via NPR) It turns out, people in the USA don’t buy nearly as much used clothes as they generate. So where does it all go? For entrepreneurs in developing countries, used clothes is good business. Their customers that can’t afford the clothes new can buy them used, diverting the clothes from the landfill. Developing countries are essential to a circular economy. However, despite the positive ecological implications, importing used goods is actually illegal in many countries that engage in this kind of work (Nigeria, Phillipines, India), due to policies meant to protect local textile manufacturing.
This rack of scrubs is also suspect for the same reasons: non-uniform colors, large tags.
Typically only lightly used before being outgrown, children’s jackets are the perfect candidate for being sold for reuse.
American Eagle represents the typical new clothes retailer. In comparison, used or remanufactured clothes have a lower cost of goods, but since the retail price is so low, it requires more pieces to be sold, which translates to more overhead. At a boutique thrift store, prices might be more similar to full price retail, but the overhead is still increased as garments must be sorted and filtered to make sure they match the store’s style and quality bar.
But what about all of the other clothes in Factory 2-U? Wanting to know more, I bought some pieces to take home and tear down.
First up, a sunny Batman vs Dracula hoodie AND sweatpants set for my son, $3. Made in Egypt, and 65% polyester / 35% cotton.
Looking closely at the heather grey fabric, it says Zoo York, a streetwear brand popular in the 90s and early 2000s. But the tag doesn’t say Zoo York, it says Bentex. What gives?
We saw some more obvious examples of remanufacturing earlier, but this one is a little more subtle. It’s not uncommon for children’s clothes to be cut out of used adult clothes. I wasn’t able to find a picture of any Zoo York apparel made out of the exact fabric from the Batman outfit, but the heather grey sleeves on this sweatshirt are pretty close.
This echos these children’s jeans I once found at a Dollarama in Canada, after reading about them in Secondhand.
The jeans are made from used adult jeans. The same brand, with exactly the same labelling, also sells jeans that are made new, but since they are being sold for $3 CAD, the newly made jeans use fabric that’s way thinner and flimsier than regular denim.
Next we have this bright blue crop jacket, 100% polyester (except for the stretchy trim on the wrists and waist — that’s 98% polyester and 2% spandex). The buttons, zippers, pockets, and lining lends quite a bit of complexity in its design. It’s made in China where labor costs are now higher than many other countries, due to increased skill and wealth. Why was it being sold for so little?
All is revealed when the garment is flipped inside-out. This is likely a factory reject, due to a sewing error on the sleeve. It makes sense why there are a few of the same kind of jacket being sold at the store — they are likely all garments that failed to pass quality control, from the same factory.
Here’s another spot-the-sewing-error puzzle: a $4 polyester hoodie made in Bangladesh out of 100% polyester.
Did you see it? The top of the kangaroo pocket is sewn with an extremely visible chain stitch, compared to the bottom of the pocket, which is sewn normally. Probably someone made a mistake, and the chain stitch was used to cover it up when there wasn’t enough fabric to do the nice folded-over edge.
Next up we have these two women’s shirts for $2.99 each. Both are 95% Rayon and 5% Spandex. The red one is made in Bangladesh, and the grey one in China.
These are super thin — almost see-through. In countries with cheap labour (countries like Cambodia and Bangladesh come to mind), the cost of sewing is so low that the main determinant of the garment price is fabric quality. You can bet that someone sat in a costing meeting, was given a target cost of the garment, and had to find a fabric so thin and so cheap that it matched the requirements.
Finally there is this nice brown women’s T-shirt. It’s by a well known brand used for silkscreen printing shops for custom apparel — Bella Canvas. 100% cotton and made in Vietnam. But it’s only $1.99. This one was on a rack by itself, so it’s likely used, or an extra from someone’s custom apparel silkscreen printing job. Either way, this isn’t the first time it’s been sold.
The beginnings of a circular economy
The popular journalist take that cheap clothes are a product of exploited factory workers is just one facet of many in the apparel manufacturing industry. While some of the items I bought were the product of cheap fabric and cheap labour, there were also examples of reuse. Cheap clothing that is inexpensive because it has been discarded, either by the factory during quality control, or by consumers after being worn, is the closest I’ve ever come to ethical consumption under capitalism.
The world will continue developing; cheap labour has moved from the USA to Japan to China, and now on to countries like Vietnam, Cambodia, and Bangladesh.
Increase in manufacturing in a country eventually gives the people leverage to increase quality of life, and labour prices. An optimist would say that eventually, the number of places that companies can use to sew their cheap fast fashion will dry up.
Reselling or remanufacturing clothes that have already been worn is good business. The missing catalyst to mature the circular economy is an incentive to create high quality, durable, classically beautiful garments that are still worth something on their second, or even third time in the market. Who knows what that form will take. Maybe it won’t happen at all until government policy forces it. Cheap clothes will never die, but if this civilization can be trusted to do the right thing, the flimsy fad fashion of the future will no longer be profitable.
