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A guest post from Double X writer Erika Kawalek:
Rarely is the public let in on how clothes actually get made—the
gritty world of sourcing, manufacturing, cross-ocean container
shipping, distribution and slick marketing that goes into supplying
that perpetually regenerating stock of textile novelties we call
fashion.
That may change. On June 7, the New York Times ran a story about the new barcode sticker called GS1 DataBars.
DataBars store information that is useful to retailers, the kind of
tidings that are meaningless to shoppers: inventory stats and sales
data. I marveled at the possibilities of an enhanced version. What if
we could...(To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Via Flowing Data, I see that Zappos.com will now show you who is buying what from where in real time. Thus I can sit in front of my laptop, stare at pictures of shoes superimposed on a map of the United States, and make wild generalizations about regional fashion preferences based on isolated financial transactions. Rigorous preliminary research reveals that people in the Los Angeles area like cute strappy sandals.
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Meghan, Dayo, Dahlia, the study that purports to show that when women are premenstrual they tend to spend more impulsively sounds like so many of the other specious findings of evolutionary psychology about how women behave during different phases of their hormonal cycle. These researchers seem obsessed with proving that female humans, like other female mammals, actual experience estrus, or go into "heat." They can't stand that that human female ovulation is hidden, and as a result are obsessed with finding clues to female behavior (shopping sprees, dressing more provocatively) to prove that we are actually controlled by our hormones. It doesn't seem to matter that their research (and the silliness of some of these "experiments" is epic) often proves nothing; they always conclude it proves their case. I find the case, however, rather insidious. How is it different from the arguments of a generation ago that women are just too emotional, irrational, and controlled by their hormones to actually be in positions of power? Think of all the women teachers, co-workers, bosses you've had over the years. Have you ever actually been able to tell where any of them is in their menstrual cycle by their behavior? And think of their male equivalents. Is anyone doing research to explain why they seem rational some days and nuts on others?
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Anybody else miss out on the shopping gene? Other people who are not Keira Knightley seem to enjoy it, though. Now that my kids are getting older—they turn 13 in a couple of weeks—they are showing signs that it only skipped a generation, which is how I wound up spending my Friday night at the Montgomery Mall. And seeing for myself what deep trouble we are in: No one was there, shoppers or salespeople, to the point that I began to have horror-flick fantasies. (Oh no, it's the Rapture and we've been left behind at the Montgomery Mall? How humiliating.) Because no one can afford new inventory, it was also like a visit to the Island of Misfit Toys (and Sweaters)—with everything good and pawed over, and prices so marked down that the signs might as well have said, What Were We Thinking? (I saw the same crèche I bought in Assisi a couple of years ago for about 20 times the price, marked down by 50 percent. But even in flush times, what nincompoop was ever going to spend 700 bucks for three plastic wise men?)
I was sorry I even walked into the furniture store, since by doing so I cruelly raised the hopes of the woman who was obviously the owner. Lots of good bargains, she called out, and seemed like she was about to cry. At this little "jewelry'' store my daughter likes, everything in the place was on sale for $2.99. We were the only customers and had to wait at the checkout for quite some time before a lone employee emerged from the back office to ring us up. The store was going out of business in a couple of days, she said. Oh, I'm sorry, I started to say, but she stopped me: Nah, not to worry; it wasn't her store, thank God, though this was the fourth business in the mall to go under in the last month alone, and she was starting to wonder where she was going to find a J-O-B. The place was so still all through Christmas, she said, that the highlight of her season was the day a shoplifter ran through the mall with six or eight security guards in hot pursuit—and got away. Gosh, not so entertaining for the proprietors, though, huh? And I can't help but think how much harder the months or years ahead are going to be for people who used to like coming here.
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Numbers are supposed to explain everything that happens in the economy, and there are numbers that can help illustrate why a couple thousand people assembled in a Long Island parking lot were so hellbent on out-consuming one another that they were not above stepping on a thirtysomething overnight stock worker named Jdimytai Damour as he literally lay dying. While same-store sales are projected to fall nearly 7% this year from
last across America's retailers, Wal-Mart is expected to outperform its
peers by 9 percentage points. While the end result for Wal-Mart is only a 2% gain over last year's sales, the trajectory, relative to the rest of retail-land, and the rest of the economy, and the plunging net worths of everyone with a house or a retirement plan, and the general sense that those trends can only over the next few quarters and years continue, is impressive. Here is how impressive: many Wal-Marts reportedly ran out of cash to make change before banks opened! Cash, which people are using allegedly because the credit crisis has cut off people from debt -- but have these people never heard of debit cards? Are they so overstretched that their bank accounts have been snowed under by dozens of overdraft fees? (Hey, I've been there!) But if that's the case, what the hell, in this economy, are they doing buying anything -- much less leaving the house after a 3,000 calorie meal to line up in the cold for twelve hours to buy it?
I have been on the Black Friday beat before, when I covered retail for the Wall Street Journal, and my sense was always that people shopped on Black Friday because it was Black Friday. It was, like holidays and sporting events, a tradition. The sales were often no better than they were in the desperate days before Christmas, days which are sure to be direly desperate this year. Truly price-sensitive consumers often found better deals on the internet, and anyway, truly rational price-sensitive consumers recognize the opportunity cost of all that sitting out in a cold exurban parking lots is way too steep when considered against those same hours spent working time and a half. Nope, it was tradition -- a distinctly so-grotesque-as-to-have-become-a-parody-of-itself one, like eating contests or bull fights or American Idol auditions, perhaps, but a tradition nonetheless. And traditions, while comfortable, are in no way rational. The populace will take much longer to discard them than is necessarily efficient.
Which underscores a larger point about this sickening tragedy, and sales. Retailers and the market shy away from making grand pronouncements on the basis of isolated events, but maybe here our lawmakers can show leadership: maybe ban Black Friday -- by forcing retailers to make all Black Friday prices, or all prices selling merchandise below wholesale cost, available on the internet, since all these hard-core "loss-leader" tactics to drive traffic to stores only really serves to whip shoppers into an irrational frenzy which is only dubiously justified by any profit it generates. I would venture not a single person working in retail anywhere on the totem pole really likes Black Friday for anything other than psycho-sentimental reasons. It's a pain, it's cutthroat, it's subject to an absurd degree of Wall Street scrutiny and you end up losing money on the vast majority of the products whose prices you slash only to pray you make it back before December 24. It is, in other words, irrational, and by extension inefficient.
Until recently sales were highly regulated in much of Europe, confined to certain seasons, something American retail executives found socialistic but which actually had the effect of minimizing waste, creating retailers like H&M that controlled their inventory tightly and were capable of delivering merchandise on an as-needed "just in time" regular replenishment schedule, so that no one got stuck trying to offload 16,000 green checked leotards that bombed on the store shelves or whatever. As a result of these laws and other factors, consumption culture in Europe was and remains comparatively civil. And while there are many things the world needs now, civility is not a bad start.
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The funny thing about Sarah Palin's expensive new wardrobe is that most of her recent purchases are faux down-market, simple pieces like the black pencil skirt she had on at the convention, or the white blouses she often wears -- clothes that look as if they could have come from Talbot's, but didn't. Which is just what they're shooting for, so to speak, because that way she looks great, yet not too high falootin'. But wait, her spokeswoman says they always intended to donate her clothes to charity after the campaign; does that imply they expect to lose? Do they want them dry-cleaned and left in a bag at the door before they ship her back where she came from? Or does it mean that, win or lose, they're taking the clothes off her back? That doesn't seem very sporting. But it is very Cinderella - there's another archetype for you, Hanna -- and I guess on Nov. 4th it turns midnight.
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