4 ms·
It seems like this policy would lead to shortages in less common sizes of clothing.
by nieksand 3mo ago
It seems like this policy would lead to shortages in less common sizes of clothing.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- josephcsible 3mo agoHow do you figure?
- flowerbreeze 3mo agoIt seems plausible. Less common sizes have a lower chance of being sold out, so if they can no longer be destroyed at the end and need to be further managed at lower quantities, it can become more cost effective to simply not make them. Whether it is true or not, I don't know.
- palata 3mo agoHmm... say you estimate that you will sell 1000 items of "normal size", you stock 1000 items, and hope that you sell all of them. You end up selling 900, you have a remaining 10%. No say you estimate that you will sell 10 items of "less common size", you stock 10 items, and hope that you sell all of them. You end up selling 9, you have a remaining 10%. How does that make a difference?
- jandrewrogers 3mo agoThere is no global definition of "less common size". It varies greatly from one locale to another. At the same time, production has relatively high fixed costs and is centralized. It would be very expensive for the global factory to customize the distribution of sizes manufactured for a retail store in Des Moines, Iowa. The order is tiny and it would require customized logistics, all of which greatly increases cost and complexity.
- flowerbreeze 3mo agoIt's more like if you find one mushroom in the forest, it doesn't make sense to bring it home, get the knife, clean it, get the pan, oil the pan, fry the mushroom, eat it, clean the knife, clean the pan, put things away. It's not worth the effort for just one mushroom. If there are many, a lot of these actions only need to be taken once.
- palata 3mo agoRight. So what you're saying is that instead you should be allowed to go in the forest to get another 99 mushrooms, give them the same treatment, and then throw them away? And suddenly it's worth it for one mushroom if you threw away 99 other mushrooms in the process?
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- wisty 3mo ago> Right. So what you're saying If you start a sentence with "so what you are saying", and then say something obviously silly ... The argument would be that it's a large burden to have to write a report if you forage 10 mushrooms and toss one away. Low volumes, higher fixed costs.
- palata 2mo agoWait. I say "how does wasting 10% have more impact if you waste 10% of 10 or 10% of 1000?", and they answer "it's just not worth doing it for 1". I just don't see how this is related to waste. Of course if it's not profitable when you sell 100% of what you produce, then it is not profitable (that's a tautology). My question is: why is it more profitable to sell the same amount but to waste more? Turns out someone explained in another comment [1], and the "it's just not worth it for one mushroom" just does not explain it. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48962668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48962668
- Dylan16807 3mo ago
- ungreased0675 3mo agoCompanies should have extensive data on how many of what size they can expect to sell.
- altairprime 3mo agoThe missing factor in cheap-fast fashion here is warehousing costs. Companies are shredding shoes and landfilling clothing — and underproducing relative to what they could sell — rather than paying money to store products in a warehouse. One possible outcome the EU sellers can choose is to reinvest in product storage, so that they can raise their production targets to meet demand rather than to minimize product storage — at which point there is a vast demand for outlier sizes that is, today, unmet due to the unwillingness to store anything.
- toast0 3mo agoIf your minimum run is 1000 of a size, and you can only really sell 500 because it's an uncommon size, and you would prefer to sell at full price or not at all, seems like making that size no longer fits your plans.
- watermelon0 3mo agoWouldn't it be cheaper to only produce 500 items, instead of producing 1k, and throwing half of it away?
- SpicyLemonZest 3mo ago1k in this example would be the minimum needed to make it worth the static cost of setting up and tearing down the production run.
- binaryturtle 3mo agoMany years ago I worked in the printing industry. F.ex. a client wants 100 products of something (e.g. posters or flyers), usually it was more cost effective to produce a 1000 (or more) and then throw away 900 the client didn't need. Obviously a huge waste of material.
- palata 3mo agoIsn't that law exactly trying to avoid that kind of waste?
- toast0 3mo agoYes. But in some cases the waste will be avoided by not doing a production run at all if the minimum production quantity is too high and the law prohibits destroying the unwanted product.
- palata 3mo agoI just don't get how it is cheaper in total to produce more units and throw them away. If you make more units, it's cheaper per unit. But doesn't it mean that waste is always a loss?
- s1artibartfast 3mo agoIt's really different depending on if the manufacturer has Brand reputation or is just a replaceable good. For no name jeans, they probably just keep making them and donate the leftovers. For a high-end designer dress, may be better to not manufacture large or small sizes that don't sell frequently.
- cm2012 3mo agoNormally you can overproduce clothing and make three of every size or something, knowing that it only costs a couple bucks to make another shirt, for instance. And you can throw out if you make too many. If it's illegal to throw it out, maybe that raises the price from $2 to $4 because now you have to pay for storage for a long time. So you'll buy less inventory at the start, which usually means cutting less common sizes first
- Dylan16807 3mo ago> because now you have to pay for storage for a long time Or you sell the extras off at a discount and it's fine.
- jandrewrogers 3mo agoCurrently, unpopular sizes are over-produced because they are subsidized by popular sizes. If the unpopular sizes have to be paid for, the logistics and production processes would push producers to under-produce popular sizes. A key insight is that what constitutes an "unpopular size" is a very local phenomenon. Every point of retail sells a different, semi-predictable distribution of sizes. It is much cheaper to ship sizes no one will buy than to manage the logistics of exactly matching local demand for a specific distribution of sizes. I asked the same question to someone who works in this business and got an eye-opening detailed explanation that made it obvious in hindsight why things the work the way the do. The difference in product cost and logistics infrastructure was not small.
- 4ndrewl 3mo agoThe invisible hand of the market will rectify this of course. Nothing to see here.
- mpyne 3mo agoThe invisible hand of the market has been handcuffed a bit here though. Though I imagine this will simply show up as higher cost rather than blanket inavailability.
- altairprime 3mo agoIf a charity sets up a ‘returned product classification’ flow and issues tax credits to companies donating their return flow to the charity, then companies can simply shunt returns to charity and lower their costs in triplicate: 1) changeover of return provider replaces expense with deduction; 2) compliance with EU regulations costs shipping to charity; 3) charity provides itemized receipts for compliance and further tax credits. Of course, companies won’t actually lower their prices to reflect the net reduction in costs, but it will certainly strip away the excuse that they must raise costs.
- mpyne 3mo agoCouldn't they already do this today, without an additional regulation? Why is a charity supposed to be able to magically conjure sales the original seller was unable to find? I just think if it was as easy to doing this, there's already be nothing for regulators to be complaining about.
- altairprime 3mo agoPossibly? I’m not sure anyone’s ever considered it before, since prior to this EU regulation there was nothing directing innovation in this space. I might well be the first to come up with the idea :) Corporations regularly price goods higher than demand in order to delay lowering prices or create artificial scarcity — see gas stations, rental collusion companies, and Prada bags, for example. Charities don’t have to sell clothes received at all to ‘pay’ the donator in tax credits. This law is about forcing corporations to one way or another deliver 100% of their finished goods to end users rather than diverting a massive fraction of that to waste streams, and charities can use clothes up to a point.
- altairprime 3mo agoYes, this will likely exacerbate that further in the short-term: if retailers simply stop producing outlier sizes to reduce disposal of those sizes, then various niches will open up. In US women’s flats, very few go up to size 12+ (it’s already higher-cost to make products in outlier sizes and most don’t!) and so the one retailer (agaik) that offers that size has 100% market share, and keeps an inventory warehouse of unsold product that is listed until it sells at up to 80% discounts after a year-plus on the shelf. Another handful of retailers specialize exclusively in women’s clothing for people XL and above, which allows them to profit equally as well from less-common sizes. My hope, however, is that this reduces overseas manufacturing in favor of domestic, which would allow retailers to dramatically reduce the shipping costs for small production batches, so that they’re able to simply produce more small batches of less-common sizes in response to demand. Sure, they might see a few percent lower profits per item, but they’ll be able to sell considerably more of their product simply by raising their supply to meet demand with finer granularity than the cheaper ‘produce an entire season one-time only and store it in a cargo container’ model offers today.
- cbg0 3mo agoIt can be made available online with a longer lead time if the manufacturers care enough about it. I guess it depends on whether the complexity is worth it, because if you're just selling cheap fast fashion then discounting/donating might still be worth it even if you produce excess, but more high-end brands probably won't stock uncommon sizes.
- edelbitter 3mo agoIf they do not need to get rid of last months colors as fast, because the economic sweet spot has slightly moved towards longer production runs per design, they might as well also have longer intervals during which all sizes in production are in stock simultaneously.