If having garments made in China are supposed to bring prices down then why...

[bridgit]

are nearly all the Chinese manufactured shirts in Tommy Bamaha's http://www.tommybahama.com/index.jsp averaged out at $65-$75, with some at nearly $130 and $60 T-shirts

Where's the price break? They're making them cheaper, but selling them for more. It's a lose/lose situation for the consumer on the street.

[Liberal_in_LA]

1. rip off overpriced status crapola

[bridgit]

3. their market share is going down and they just can't figure out why...

[SoCalDem]

2. If people would STOP BUYING THEM, the manufacturers

would either have to stop making them or price them lower..

A shirt is a shirt is a shirt..

People who buy "fashion" to impress people they won't even remember in a few years, or who they never even know their names, is ..well foolish..

[bridgit]

4. never underestimate the power of vanity...

i still buy out of thrift stores, but the vanity & easy profit markets are still chugging along

[SoCalDem]

8. Because people put that stuff on their credit cards..

A $100 shirt is easy to buy when you don;t have to count out the twenties..

Just wait.. Pretty soon the day of reckoning is coming, and once credit is obsolete, shopping will change a LOT..

I always told my kids that they should do the math when they buy stuff..

Make $10 an hour at a shitty job? That $80 pair of shoes just cost you MORE than eight hours' work at that job you love to hate.. and in a few weeks, you won't even like those shoes..

[bridgit]

12. i'm ready for it to change a lot...

i think it's one of the oddest ideas that somethings such as economic expansion & profits will climb on a graph ever upward ad infiniti, when there are clearly saturation points that resist that very idea i.e. how many Beneton sweaters can one own even if they live in a cold climate? how many computers? socks?

bush snapped out after 9-11, there was the precursor, "All y'all get on down to the mall and float this phony bolonga economy. Buy a pair of pants, a news suit, go on vacation."

what utter delusion; they hate us, hate our democracy, but they both love & need the smell of our money...

like i'm going to trot off to the mall and buy a Beneton sweater made in China for $60, that's just plain stoopit and they need to know that we know

[NanceGreggs]

22. Bravo! Well said, and with the appropriate passion ...

... AND INTELLIGENCE!!!

[sandnsea]

5. Well yeah

that's been true for years. You never noticed Nikes prices falling just because they're made overseas, did ya? The stock market went from 2800 to 13000 in 20 years. That's how it happened. All those profits from high priced brand names made with cheap labor.

And then there's this. Dismantling a decrepid polluting factory in the northeast to move to Guatemala where it will spew out its pollutants so that more cheap labor can be exploited for the benefit of the stockholder.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph...

[bridgit]

7. sure, and i won't but 300-$400 tennis shoes either...

but someone sure is

[sandnsea]

10. Updated, Guatemala story

Check that out. I don't understand how any of these people consider themselves moral.

[Solon]

6. "bringing down the price" is the line they sell us, its a lie...

In reality its "Increase the profit margin". When you only have to pay somewhere around a few pennies in labor for every shirt or shoe made, that's more money in the Corporation's pocket, not yours.

[bridgit]

9. it is a lie, true...

the retail market is reeling, maybe time to send yet another message that these lies and the practices they inspire will no longer suffice

[Deja Q]

25. And if the MSM wrote the OP's editorial,

would they say "US Corporation" or "multinational corporation"?

[Selatius]

11. They can sell them for 65 to 75 because people are willing to buy them for that price.

The free market is a lot of things. Perfect it is not. If there were many more competitors in the market for name brand clothing, the prices would be lower because there is always at least one guy and possibly more on the block who works to steal everybody else's market share through a price war.

Of course, we don't operate in an environment of perfect competition. That idea only exists on paper, not in reality. (Critics say socialism looks better on paper as well, but I digress) Economists say we operate in oligopolistic competition in reality, competition between a limited and often small number of firms for a large number of customers. See the oil companies for an example of oligopolistic competition. In that market, they don't want to compete against each other in vicious price wars because it eats up profit margins.

[bridgit]

14. some such franchise' are having trouble, and they just can't put their finger on it...

hasn't occurred to them yet exorbitant prices, not to mention endless war, death & international chaos may be playing a part

[aquart]

13. The price break is for the manufacturer, not you.

[bridgit]

15. ya'think...

cause that's what i think, even though the rationale for all jobs being out-sourced is a forever mantra of keeping prices down...they are going up instead

[Selatius]

16. We could levy tariffs on foreign-made goods. In fact, we could go back to the tariff system.

The tariff system had been in place since the early 1800s to favor American manufacturing. Before then, America largely relied on foreign producers in Great Britain and other European powers for manufactured goods. We had our own manufacturing base, but it was underdeveloped, a cottage industry really. The tariffs ensured that buyers favored American-made goods because it gave American firms an advantage over foreign firms, who passed on the added cost of tariffs onto consumers giving American firms a price advantage.

The result was the Industrial Revolution came to America. The resources to fuel the Revolution came from not just America's mineral wealth and the genius of its workers and entrepreneurs but wealth taken from third world nations in Latin America and other parts of the world colonized by the US. In America, workers fought and unionized, which allowed some of the wealth to be shared in the aftermath of the Gilded Age and the massive Railroad Barons and Robber Barons of the late 1800s. With the New Deal and unionism, wages in America exploded, all supported by a huge manufacturing engine.

The engine was ultimately dismantled through free trade deals, envisioned in the late 1960s with slow and then rapid implementation through the 1970s, 1980s, reaching its maximum rate in the 1990s. The engine was only as strong as the tariff system allowed it to be. With the tariff "shield" removed, it was only a matter of time before the machinery was torn apart by cheaper labor overseas. Wage gains forged under the old system are now being lost, especially due to inflation. The winners in this massive upheaval are the major owners who operate these corporations. Your typical shareholder with a portfolio for retirement isn't an "owner" in a practical sense. The owners are the billionaires and those with net worths in the tens if not hundreds of millions.

On the board of directors, their voice is louder than your voice.

[bridgit]

18. well short of all that drama we should probably give free trade a real try...

and for that matter democracy while we're at it; but with either or both in play, won't someone be taking a back seat? like maybe greed? or Smith's 'invisible hand'?

by & large corporations don't care about democracy all they care about are easements, rights of way, tax cuts, and lately: eminent domain,

board members little care for the opinions of their own shareholders, no, imo...

this thing is too far beyond a simple recitation of turn of the century mis-steps & half deeds

this thing needs some serious fixing, likely from the inside of the human head ~ out

[Selatius]

20. We have given it a real try. Everything is made outside the US now.

It has not benefited the wages of the working poor and the middle class. What do you propose? Unionization with service-sector employers now that manufacturers are all gone?

[bridgit]

27. where have we given free trade a real try? were we to have done so...

several so-called 'key' players within key industries would have dropped out i.e. Dusenberg, Chrysler & Studebaker, g.w. bush himself would have been forced to eat his own shit quite some time ago now but for his daddy's bailout scenario'

[Selatius]

34. When we eliminated the tariff system.

Without tariffs, an assembly line worker making 40,000/year couldn't compete against an assembly line worker who makes 5,000 or 10,000/year. The notion of free trade has been and will always be a strawman. It's simply there to get people to defend a position that the people who drafted the plans never would have held: The idea that this plan was created by the people at the top with the best intentions for all people. Comparative advantage, which is the basic theory under free trade, has not won out over comparative costs, and they knew that from the beginning. Until such time allows the notion of comparative advantage to trump comparative costs, forget about free trade; it's building a house on quicksand. You'd need a Congress and White House uncorrupted by corporate money to do such a thing.

[Beerboy]

17. Who's Tommy Bamaha?

Never heard of him, but I guess it's cool he could hire Chinese slave-masters/overseers to whip up production of T-shirts for the US market.
It's unconscionable.
America is officially morally bankrupt.

[bridgit]

19. i never heard of him either...

[KoKo]

42. Upscale "resort type" clothing. Popular with the Country Club set

and high rolling stock brokers and such...who don't have anything else to do with their money. To them 75.00 for a shirt is pocket change. Good for Tommy and good for the High Rollers. You can find knock offs at Target or any of the Discount stores. Fabric is a little thinner and a few less buttons...but the look is the same. That's why they are "vanity" clothes.

[Jim Warren]

21. Ask Phil Knight. nt

[youngdem]

23. The OWNERS get the price break. You get shittier quality goods at inflated prices

Isn't outsourcing grand?

[Deja Q]

24. For the same reasons CEOs justify their big salaries - because their decisions

make or break their company.

And, yeah, the same argument can be made for fairly much any industry. Except prices never seem to go down.

[ReverendDeuce]

26. Well... Tommy Bahama shirts are NICE...

I own about a dozen of them. Very high quality. Nat Nast are great, too.

[bridgit]

29. ya'know, out of the thousands of shirts in that store, hubby only found maybe 2...

that even remotely interested him...they were still both from Made In China, but neither one was even in his size and the price is always over the top

[ReverendDeuce]

33. Style has no bearing on quality of craftsmanship...

And let's face it -- nice things cost more than cheap things.

[bridgit]

35. Fortunately, our clientele does not require that we appear as though...

we just stepped off the pages of a Tommy Bahama catalog, here it's referred to as: California Business Casual, and that is a fairly wide berth when it comes right down to it

[sandnsea]

36. Let's face it

when two shirts are made in China, and one is sold here for $10 and the other for $65 - you are not paying $55 for craftsmanship. Wake Up Dude! You're paying for your doctor's vacation home.

[ReverendDeuce]

41. LOL

So, the cheap shirt is promised to be the same quality? Hahaha... have you heard of "you get what you pay for"? All this China talk is case and point. If Tommy Bahama can make a high quality shirt in China, great. If they made mediocre shit in China and sold it for a high price, then nobody would buy it. The problem is when nobody knows any better...

[Stephanie]

28. Silly Wabbit! The price break is not for YOU.

The price break is for the corporate profiteers, of course.

[bridgit]

30. awww, thanks, Hon, do think that has been reviewed thence but continues it to remain...

That the bastids used that rationale for the reason they were lying to our faces!!!

still morning here

[Nikia]

31. There is a lot of inexpensive clothing out there

To me, it seems that the price of inexpensive clothing has not gone up much in my (being in my late 20's) lifetime. I also can buy athletic shoes at a lower price now than I bought in high school.
It could be that prices are starting to catch up because manufacturing clothes in China has become the norm and people are getting used to paying more for other items. Companies who are saving on labor costs see this as an oppurtunity to make more money.

[bridgit]

32. I think there's a lot of truth to that, nobody complains about $3/gal gas anymore...

Sure we're upset about it, but nobody is marching even against the Iraq war to speak of. Tellingly however, I am no longer able to buy shoes for what I bought them for in H.S., being nearer to 40 drat the years sometimes, harrumph! While shoes that are simply too cheap merely fall apart in ever shorter spans of time.

These people that set these prices & policies seem to know very well, that the vast majority of the people beneath their steely gaze are creatures of habit. And that is is simply a matter of time before even the most vocal soon either fall silent in the face of ever upward living costs, or better yet...simply fall in line.

That in time all will stop squawking about matters they have no input regarding, and get back to their Chinese Levi's, their counter-culture T-shirts, and their access to broadband.

The Chambers Brothers-Time Has Come Today

[sandnsea]

38. Compare to 30 years ago

Over the course of real time, prices have not gone down even though 80% of products are made at 50 cents an hour. I haven't checked the price of sports shoes in a while, but there's always been a difference in the quality of a Shopko pair of Nikes and a real pair of $150 athletic shoes. And the ones at the outlet malls, many of them are specifically produced for those venues and are cheaper quality as well. It's all in the marketing, and the stockholder and CEO are the only ones reaping the benefits.

[Deja Q]

39. The trouble is, this downward spiral cannot go on forever.

When walmart employees can't even afford the products they stock on the shelves...

[Solon]

40. I worked a Wal-Mart, I shopped at Goodwill. n/t

[bleedingheart]

44. and there are sales

my husband works in an office...I launder his shirts and he irons them..

We have discovered that the Ralph Lauren cotton shirts hold up best for constant use..but they are expensive. So we buy them only when they are on sale..which is rare..but it happens.

I have gotten $75 shirts for $25.

I could buy a shirt that is normally $25 but some of them don't hold up as well...

I find that if the consumer just waits it out...you can drive down the price by not buying it right away...no matter the item.

I got a cool book that originally was $80 for $9 at Barnes and Noble...just because I balked at the original price...apparently loads of other people did too...

[blues90]

37. It's been a mind game for years now

It's their intent , always has been .

First it began with mail order cheap products for say pets , then along comes the box store with the at the time cheaper prices and no one really bothered to look at where the products were made , the cheap price tags blinded them or all else .

Once the box stores sprouted up enough to kill off the indepnedants then the prices began to rise , slow and a bit more and again it was not the cheap price as much as it was all there was available .


There are box stores for everything now , clothes , home products , business products , building matierials , pets , musical instruments and so on . All do not look like the box store but they are all the same thing with a different face .

Sears isn't even sears anymore , not long ago the only credit card they would take was sears and they only sold sears products , it's not like that anymore .

I would be quite pleased to see them all burn to the ground all in the same instant then maybe we could bring back the american worker and give them some real wages and a chance to get ahead rather than be slaves selling cheap labor products from god knows where .

[bleedingheart]

43. If you didn't buy them at the $120 price tag...soon they go on sale

I have seen loads of clothing of many styles go on sale for much much much less...after people didn't buy them at the higher prices.

Hell I saw a Ralph Lauren comforter cover at the store yesterday..$375...on sale at $199...and then marked down 60% off lowest price...so now it is $79..