An interesting story from last week’s New York Times caught my eye today. It is about fashion chains destroying new, unsold clothing for efficiency reasons. The article quotes a woman who apparently found hundreds of garments tagged for sale in Wal-Mart. They had holes punched through it by a machine. She also quite regularly found H&M clothing: ‘gloves with the fingers cut off’ and ‘men’s jackets, slashed across the body and arms’.
Marco Arment comments on the article on his blog:
Many stores have arrangements to return any unsold or outdated merchandise to their suppliers for credit. With this arrangement, the stores take little risk, so suppliers can convince them to stock new or short-lived items. For items of significant value, like electronics, it works as you’d expect: the stores just ship them back.
But many items aren’t worth shipping back, so the stores and suppliers have a wasteful but effective arrangement: the stores simply tell the suppliers how many of each item didn’t sell, the suppliers give the stores credit for them, and the stores must destroy them.
Yes, that is indeed what he’s saying: ‘must destroy them’. He further tells that he himself used to work at a store where they ‘had to cut (perfectly good) USB cables in half’ and ‘scratch the software CDs with a box cutter’. I’m glad Marco blogged this, because I could not really regard the NYT story as true. But seemingly it is.
According to Marco, ‘it’s hard to come up with a better solution that’s realistic, practical, and economical for the involved parties’. Because in the end, it is all about profit. Oh, oh, what a bad, bad world we’re in.
