9 ms·

All these explanations are rather complicated. I think the simplest explanation is the best: people don't have the free money to spend on clothing. This is ev

• tehlike 9y ago
  People don't have the time to spend on clothing.
  • tehlike 9y ago
    This is going to sound a bit arrogant, but a person has only room for so many decisions for a day before they get burned for the day. This is why i prefer to pick a random tshirt, wear same sneakers etc every day (they are clean, yes). I tend to grab food from the same truck, at the same time - i do not think about it.
    • kimdcmason 9y ago
      Doesn't sound arrogant at all. People are pressed for time, and the costs of spending time on clothing outweigh the benefits for many.
• lotsofpulp 9y ago
  Agree, I think the income and wealth gap are bigger contributors to many of the shifts in consumer habits. Some is due to experiences and stuff you can take pictures of being in vogue, but given the opportunity, people will choose to show status. They just can't afford to since they have less now. I wish there were stats showing different segments of the market, but in a simple observation, look at the declining results of mid market retailers (even online). You have luxury doing okay, like Nordstroms, but nothing else until you get to the much lower priced brands.
• muninn_ 9y ago
  People don't have the money to spend on clothing, but can spend it on experiences and travel? Either one of those seems like a free money purchase, with clothing being less of one. I don't disagree with your assertion that wages have been stagnant and that cost of living is increasing (which should be obvious as more people == fewer resources) but even from my own anecdotal experience as somebody who is paid very well I buy fewer clothes than I used to. I buy nice clothes, but the clothes I have are clothes that don't go out of style, or even if they do I just don't care. Maybe more Americans feel this way as well? And as others have mentioned, the work place is fortunately becoming more casual with respect to dress. I work in finance and even here we wear t-shirts and jeans. There's no reason for me to buy 10 shirts from Brooks Brothers, 3 suits, ties, dress shoes, sweaters to go with the shirts, etc. as my casual clothes are also what I wear to work. Maybe more people are spending less on "brands" like Burberry and more on H&M or lifestyle brands (Arcteryx/Patagonia/NF) or basic colors/styles that don't require you to repurchase?
• briandear 9y ago
  I think your “facts” are more nuanced and complicated than you might be suggesting. Consumer prices have been declining since 1979 and non-wage benefits have been increasing. Suggesting clothes purchases are declining because wages are stagnant is logically flawed because we would expect declines in similarly elastic goods as well. But we aren’t seeing that. Consumer purchasing is growing, consumer confidence is up — pretty much the opposite of what you’re implying. The workplace however, as the parent comment suggests, is changing. http://reason.com/archives/2016/01/19/cost-of-living-vs-wage-stagnation-in-the http://reason.com/archives/2016/01/19/cost-of-living-vs-wage...
  • coliveira 9y ago
    > non-wage benefits have been increasing This is codeword to say that gains are going to people of high net worth. Most of the population still survives on wages (excepts for the ones out of work). So what you're saying doesn't disprove the fact that for most people income is going down, adjusted for inflation and for costs that don't appear on inflation statistics (housing, health care).
    • jcranmer 9y ago
      The non-wage benefit that's increasing the fastest is probably health care benefits, which is likely mostly captured by the middle class, not high net worth individuals.
      • coliveira 9y ago
        This is a benefit that cannot be accessed as disposable income, so we are back to square one. It is just a transfer of wealth from most companies to the health care sector, masked as a benefit to workers.
  • dv_dt 9y ago
    > non-wage benefits have been increasing. I strongly suspect this is predominantly out of control healthcare, and the non-wage benefits stat doesn't even capture the full 'tax' on shifted out-of-pocket healthcare costs via plan terms like higher copays.
• coliveira 9y ago
  Bingo. In a capitalist society, the better explanation is almost always an economic one. It boggles my mind that so many people find it difficult to understand this simple concept. Not only wages are stagnant, but the population is under high increases in housing and health care costs, which are not accounted in official inflation. Add this to the reduced welfare state, and you have the perfect recipe for this situation.
  • vonmoltke 9y ago
    > Not only wages are stagnant, but the population is under high increases in housing and health care costs, which are not accounted in official inflation. The US CPI does account for those, and the CPI changes are the "official" inflation rate.
    • freejulian 9y ago
      Yes, rents are certainly included in CPI. For me, it's more a question of weighting. When it's not uncommon to find people spending 50% of their income on rent, are rents being appropriately weighted in the CPI?
  • prostoalex 9y ago
    Why did the "experiences" (travel, dining out) and "digital media" (software, media purchases, data plans) grow substantially, as the article mentions?
    • coliveira 9y ago
      This is more a question of replacing some expenses than a real expansion in wages. For example, dining out is a necessity in the modern family because women are required to work in order to survive. This was not the case up to the 70s and even into the 80s. And online purchases are just replacing previous purchases like CDs, DVDs, movie theaters, cable, fixed phone line, etc., that have been eliminated by technology or made expensive for current budgets.
• adventured 9y ago
  That's refuted by the increases in US consumer spending while clothing expenditures are simultaneously falling. You'll need to support your claims about the second item. Saying it, does not make it so. Real disposable income is at an all-time high. Personal consumption expenditures are at an all-time high. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DSPIC96 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DSPIC96 Americans are also spending less each year on soda. It's not because incomes are plunging 7% per year and they can't afford Coca Cola.
  • Retric 9y ago
    Talking about total spending misses the income gap. The median consumer has real impact even as the wealthy consumers have an ever larger impact on the averages. Consider housing, people that make 10x as much rarely spend 10x as much on their home as excess becomes useless. Similarly, some people spend a lot of disposable income on clothing, but plenty of rich people don't care about clothing and spend relatively little.
  • astura 9y ago
    I wonder what is counted as soda. I've noticed, among my ageing peer group, people are switching en mass to flavored carbonated water (seltzer). Of course, that might just be due to age, but I've also noticed that more store space seems to be dedicated to these beverages, again, might just be because I'm buying them now, thus noticing.
  • freejulian 9y ago
    I mean, my statements are pretty well documented at this point. 1) After adjusting for inflation, wages have fallen and rents have increased. They've been increasing at a pace of roughly 3% above inflation/year: https://www.cbpp.org/blog/new-census-data-show-rising-rents-weak-income-growth https://www.cbpp.org/blog/new-census-data-show-rising-rents-... Additionally, people aren't saving money like they use to. In fact, the savings rate is currently the lowest its been...ever: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PSAVERT https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PSAVERT This is made obvious by the fact that the amount of actual dollars Americans have saved is also at the lowest point in history: https://www.creditdonkey.com/average-american-savings-statistics.html https://www.creditdonkey.com/average-american-savings-statis... Not sure what you're trying to show with your charts. Real DPI is merely a measure of dollars left over after taxes. Several issues with the Real DPI measurement: 1) it tells you nothing about the median household. 2) The inflation adjustments are optimistic -- who honestly believes inflation is less than 2%. 3) It doesn't change the fact that most of that after-tax income is going straight to either housing or healthcare.
• curun1r 9y ago
  Sounds more likely, and the causality of the effects GP observed may also be transitive through tightened finances. For example, more businesses could be encouraging/allowing more casual dress, in part, because they know they're not paying enough to expect their employees to wear more formal attire. So rather than spending habits being driven by workplace norms, workplace norms are likely driven by workers' ability to spend.
  • ghaff 9y ago
    If anything, there are a lot of people in fairly low-paid customer-facing jobs who are still some of the ones dressing up most consistently.
• astura 9y ago
  You're explanation is not less complicated and far from the simplest, a much simpler explanation is clothes are simply cheaper. Dunno if that's true or not, but I suspect it is just from my experience. "Fast fashion" has really taken off.
  • wott 9y ago
    Yes, with the invasion of cheap Chinese (and alike) stuff, I calculated that you can can dressed with about 3% of the minimal wage in my country (where income is a bit below the one in the USA).
• schnevets 9y ago
  This economic shift also affects the insulated, higher-class Americans by making noticeable changes on culture. In most roles, a nice suit at the office now suggests arrogance or even distrust. Instead, we venerate the "hoodie and t-shirt" CEO.
  • yardie 9y ago
    In the US we venerate our working class and, well, the business class kind of earned their reputation. Labor in working overalls is salt of the earth type. Senior exec in a suit is an empty suit. When labor makes a bad decision it only affects that person. When an exec makes a bad decision they are usually the ones not affected. The hoodie CEO is GenX/Millenials attempt to get not appear as the empty suit. To announce that they are from working class even if they are not.
  • sithadmin 9y ago
    >In most roles, a nice suit at the office now suggests arrogance or even distrust. Instead, we venerate the "hoodie and t-shirt" CEO. This is definitely not the case outside of tech, and generally not the case for firms headquartered outside the major US West Coast cities. My line of work exposes me to the senior leadership of major US and global firms across the US in a wide spread of industries (tech, energy, pharma, medicine, industrial suppliers, consumer goods, automotive), and there is an almost universal expectation that middle managers and above will be dressed in business casual attire, with one's clothing becoming increasingly formal the closer one is to the top of the management pecking order.
• rb808 9y ago
  That doesn't explain why people in the poorest countries dress better than Americans. People living in the slums of India/Nigeria/Brazil are more likely to have a collared shirt and dress pants than an American going to work in an office.
  • mertd 9y ago
    They might all have a suit but do they have "more" outfits than Americans?
    • ryanianian 9y ago
      Probably fewer "outfits" (count of pants or shirts). But in my travels the outfits are all of quality (highest that the person could afford or find) and they are all very clean. I had an hour-long conversation with a Guatemalan woman about how she hand-washes her whole family's shirts and pants every day because they each only have two sets - one for today and one for tomorrow. She took great pride in how well-dressed and clean her family was despite them not having the resources for many clothes, a washing machine, or the luxury of not having to do hard, dirty work on a regular basis.
  • ryanianian 9y ago
    This. I see two things happening here: (1) American spending less on clothing and (2) Americans having less self-pride in their attire and presentation. I've spent a fair amount of time in Latin American countries, and a real sure-fire way to identify tourists is to look for people poorly-dressed or those who look like they just don't care about how they look. E.g., despite much of Mexico being quite hot, you will almost never see a local Mexican wearing shorts, even on beaches. Tee-shirts maybe but almost always a freshly-washed button-up shirt. (Or a swimsuit if they're swimming obviously.) This is true of other Latin countries too in my travels. It's really humbling to see.
    • dopeboy 9y ago
      I was in Mexico last week near Cancun and observed exactly that. I always saw the locals with jeans and a nice shirt. There's no way I could do that in 85F weather.
• prostoalex 9y ago
  The article seems to operate on a different premise. In sentence 2, "At a time when the economy is growing, unemployment is low, wages are rebounding and consumers are eager to buy..." Do you think they're looking at the wrong economic data?
  • freejulian 9y ago
    As always, depends on how this data is being measured. Unemployment is low, but the labor force participation rate is also low. Are the jobs good quality? Wages are rebounding? I haven’t seen any evidence of this. There’s many people asking if the Phillips curve even works any more. If there had been any uptick in wages it’s a very recent uptick and hardly a trend yet.
    • PeterisP 9y ago
      It's perfectly reasonable to expect that you (or most other people) would not personally see any evidence of wage growth if it's happening. In essence, if there's a 2% growth in average real wages (which would be a major change), then it generally would happen with, say, 80% of people experiencing no change or even a decrease (i.e. nominal growth slower than inflation), and a 20% minority, usually disproportionally concentrated in particular industries and locations, experiencing a significant (e.g. 10%) growth. And, this growth often is associated with a change in position, level or industry - most of the impact is not by the same job paying more, but by slightly less people working the low-paying job and by slightly more people working the high paying job. So no matter if real growth is happening or not, personal evidence of the majority would not, could not show it unless it's on a very long timescale or the growth is sudden and rapid - you have to look at the aggregates to see if it's happening.
      • TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
        If wage growth is constrained to such a small portion of the economy, then how could it lead to runaway inflation like they fear? Couldn't they just push those jobs to areas of the country that haven't been experiencing the growth?
• morogop 9y ago
  > 2) Cost of living has been increasing well beyond the stated 2% rate of inflation. This is not a fact, and it is absurd to present it as a fact. It is an extraordinary, but baseless assertion made without any evidence.
• mc32 9y ago
  The article mentions that despite prices going down, not up, people are still buying fewer clothes. Not sure if they are counting skus or expenditure, my guess is expenditure, so if prices per article are going down (H&M vs Levi's), then of course total spending on clothing will go down, even while consumption remains the same. In any case, to me it means less waste.
  • toxik 9y ago
    It seems to me that this inexpensive clothing is of very poor quality, and that quality has been declining over time.
    • xeromal 9y ago
      The problem is if I can go to H&M and buy 15 T-shirts for around $100, why would I buy 2 or 3 nicer T-shirts that will last about the same amount of time if I cycle the cheapo 15 shirts properly?
      • nos84733675859 9y ago
        It may be better for the environment?
• xapata 9y ago
  Inflation includes a measure of wages. If wages don't change, inflation won't move much.
  • freejulian 9y ago
    CPI does not include wages.
    • xapata 9y ago
      That's consumer price index, which is only one measure of inflation.
• deegles 9y ago
  Isn't the simplest explanation that clothing simply costs less than it did before?
• bagacrap 9y ago
  Wages have not been stagnant, in fact they have shown strong enough growth to raise scares of inflation. I think focusing on the changing workplace as an influencer of clothing purchasing habits is spot on.