Has any one really looked at the cheap chineese crap that passes for clothing? It mostly looks like rags, color bleeds when washed and ruins your whole load of clothes, no regularity in sizing, colors are off season wise, who wears coral in winter, or for that matter in summer if that is the main color you carry. Women are picky about colors as they realize they can make you look bad.
Most of it is for 30 and younger, not much for seniors. Crazy color schemes that are ethnic, falls apart after 1 or 2 washing’s, crooked seams, badly sewed on buttons, shoes that are so cheaply made they don’t last 6 months.
Then there are the pre packaged meats that only GOD knows what the quality is, just like at McD’s. Cereal cost as much as it does at a grocery store, as does the basics of milk, butter, eggs or bread. No times on the pre cooked foods from the deli.
Shelves are not well stocked, to many racks on the floor and you can’t get a shopping cart around them with out knocking stuff off or over especially if you are in an electric cart, and only a couple of lines open.
Old Sam’s moto was buy American for the most part, since his death it’s buy cheap chineese crap.
I'm the last person who would pose as an expert on textiles but I have read that most clothing is now produced in other Southeast and South Asian countries. Unlikely the quality is any better but the wholesale cost is.
If you’re interested, a large, distributed textiles production industry will happen in the U.S.A. before very long. Oil consumption is increasing, and oil production will decrease (transportation for imports, rising fuel prices everywhere, costs go up).
The knowledge for designing and drafting patterns is being shared by people (mostly women) through the Internet and has already been collected by some on computer media and paper. That knowledge will enable a much more distributed (small shop) industry for finished clothing manufacturing, but we also need to finish open source (licensed for free distribution, no patents) designs for small scale (but scalable) material manufacturing equipment to keep the global outfits from pricing supplies too high for small buyers.
You see, with long-distance, complicated transportation being too expensive in the near future for the current regime (global firms), a more distributed, community-based economy can and probably will happen.
With clothing, you get what you pay for up to a certain level. Ridiculous $10,000 shirts are ridiculous. But I did a fun experiment with my son’s school red cotton polo shirts. I bought one of the uniform kind, the cheap ones you get at cheap department stores made to be low cost for people buying uniforms. I bought a few Lands End shirts. And a few from Ralph Lauren. With the pony.
He wore the heck out of these shirts from September to June. Well, most of them, anyway. By February, the cheap uniform shirt was light pink with fraying hem, and it had shrunk to where he could no longer wear it. Trash. In June, the Lands End shirts were light red, a nice even fade, and they had shrunk a bit and lost some of their shape. But they did serviceably well all year and they weren’t costly. No frays or rips. I was not surprised that the Ralph Lauren polos made it, but the bright red color had not even faded a little. They had their shape and had not noticeably shrunk at all! I honestly thought I was “paying for the pony” logo but it turns out they truly were better made and used better dyes and better cotton. They lasted the next year as well until he outgrew them.
It is better to buy used from quality yard and estate sales or ebay, from good companies, and save money that way than to buy the cheap clothing from big box stores.