Posted on 05/04/2013 4:32:40 PM PDT by rickmichaels
I'll bet you a million dollars, my left testicle and first born child they have them.
I'll bet you a million dollars, my left testicle and first born child they have them.
LOL. That’s pretty good. I wonder if any of the building inspectors have ever seen it.
You clearly don't understand the purpose of government. The building inspectors are undoubtedly paid handsome figures to ignore it.
a 400 golf driver costs about 65 bucks.
Remember that the low margin % also has to be examined in the context of how quickly a product is sold once it is added to a retailer’s inventory. A 1%-2% margin on a piece of apparel that spends no more than a few weeks on a rack is one thing, but that’s an abysmal return if you’re talking about a piano that may sit in a dealer’s inventory for months or years.
Nordstrom is a high end clothing retailer, and the vast majority of its stuff is made in China or other low-cost labor locales. Edgar filings show a gross profit margin of 31% for 1994 vs 35% for 2012. I'd wager a big part of the margin difference comes from improved purchasing power as the company's annual revenues went from $3.6b to $11.8b, its store count went from 57 to 242 and its geographical coverage went from 10 to 31 states in the ~ 20 year interval.
I suspect some of the margin difference over the years comes from retail consolidation, as regional chains become national chains, and regional chains or individual stores that can't compete go out of business or are bought out by the nationals. Fewer competitors means more pricing power. It doesn't mean that prices go up, but they might go down less in the absence of competition that went belly-up. Everybody has the same access to overseas sources of labor, but fewer competitors generally means better pricing from the seller's point of view.
My favorite Dylan song.
They don’t write them like that anymore.
Show me a news item on a phone support office in Bangledesh collapsing or a catastrophe hitting an offshored quality assurance staff and then maybe I can releate.
TSA paid about $75/shirt of taxpayer dollars for Mexican made uniforms.
Worst case scenario we open the factory in New Jersey and pay union workers $40.00 per hour, how much would that move increase the labor cost and by how much?
Let's say for argument that is takes 5 minutes to make one shirt(probably less time than that but we will go with 5 minutes of labor). the labor per shirt in Bangladesh is basically free. The labor per shirt in out New Jersey union factory per shirt is 1/12 hour times $40.00 = $3.33 per shirt.
So now the shirt would cost about 3 dollars more. Approx $17.00. OK that sounds like a lot but if you reduce the duties and shipping costs that would reduce the price a dollar to $16.00 per shirt. To me the 15% increase is offset by the decrease in social costs of the lower IQ chronically unemployed....
Takes alot of fabric to make XXXXXL shirts.
You can buy a 10’x10’ tent on Amazon.com for only $100.
I imagine that if clothing had to be made locally, we’d soon have machines that were doing the entire process. Right now, there’s no major incentive to invest in the research to make automatic sewing machines because labor in certain third world countries is so cheap that the machines would not be able to compete. But if the third world gets its act together, and their economies expand and their wages increase, machines will become more viable.
Another "benefit" was to mask inflation so that the Fed could keep printing money without apparent consequence, loaning it to the big guys who built factories overseas with it.
Bingo, and it will happen. I have a few ideas of what to do about it, but few would like them without making serious adjustments in their thinking.
--and to everyone else it's better to buy the shirt for $2 less, provide a living wage for hundreds of workers, and still have funds left over to feed the "lower IQ chronically unemployed" in Jersey.
You really hate the USA, hater GTH
I know someone to whom this happened. But this isn't a Walmart thing - it's a universal thing. With the destruction of local and regional chains, national price competition finally became a universal phenomenon. I am personally acquainted with someone who once operated a mom-and-pop grocery. There was no way she could compete with any large scale player. Big players have higher turnover and can dictate prices to the vendor. Mom-and-pop stores have inventory that sits for a while and definitely cannot dictate prices to their suppliers.
I also personally know someone who was a domestically-based Walmart supplier, and went out of business when he couldn't meet the price they demanded, and did not want to take the trouble to move his business abroad. It's the way of the world, and not a Walmart-specific phenomenon. Walmart is just bigger, so it touches more people.
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