T-shirt ideals fall victim to harsh reality of the marketplace

Throughout my 15 years in the T-shirt business, I never once visited one of the factories where our shirts were made. I wanted to, but I didn’t have the guts. Once I’m on to an injustice, I’ll cut off my nose to spite my face. It’s like when we go to Fiji and pay big daily bucks, only to be reminded that the staff earn $12 a day. Inevitably, we end up championing their complaints to the management rather than just enjoying our vacation – more than once, I’ve seen my wife giving a housekeeper a foot massage. So sometimes, it’s better not to know.

When I started out, I had the idealistic fantasy of using only organic cotton and water-based, non-toxic inks. That plan was quickly dashed when I learned that no-one was willing to pay the premium for this. They weren’t because their own customers weren’t.

In no time flat, I joined the circus where the best price ruled, even though I was knowingly probably fomenting cancer in my gut for fighting quality issues every step of the way. Why did I cave? It’s pretty simple. When we started in 1995, our shirts wholesaled for US$8-9. By the time we closed our doors in 2010, wholesale prices had dropped below US$3.

We finally gave up when it became impossible to compete with competitors who brought in literal boatloads of shirts from Pakistan and Bangladesh, produced at costs only the largest-scale buying could muster, and made in factories like the ones that recently burned in those countries, killing more than 400 workers.

If you think it’s Wal-Mart’s fault that such factories exist, though, I’d disagree. The fault lies with the existential facts of poverty and mass populations.

Wal-Mart and other mass retailers can get away with paying $2.50 for a shirt only because someone is making that possible.

Someone is making that possible because someone further down the supply chain is making that possible.

The minute the world’s factories – located in the poorest countries with the largest populations, who will do anything necessary for their daily rice – decide to increase their prices, those old competitors of ours will have no choice but to raise their prices, and on down the line until Wal-Mart sells a T-shirt for the still ridiculously low price of $7.99 instead of $5.86.

I fear, though, that these kinds of changes are never going to happen. It’s like Wal-Mart, Third World factory owners and the devil have made a deal.

The world population will continue to grow and commit endless generations to slave labour wages. The slightly more affluent will continue to drown their sorrows in retail therapy.

Wal-Mart et al will never stop demanding higher performance and better margins from year to year. And the likes of me will turn a blind eye to the plights of those down the line who help us make our living, because pretended ignorance is bliss – until the bliss bubble is busted, when we get squeezed out of business by pricing standards only the largest of our competitors can set. Somewhere along the way, we ourselves were one of those low price setters.

Funny that one of the shirts in our very first catalogue read: ‘‘Wal-Mart: Your Source for Cheap Plastic S....’’

Who knew we’d become the source’s source, and the architect of our own demise? Do you think Wal-Mart’s T-shirt sales are going to drop as a result of the people who just died in Bangladesh?

Sorry, there’s no positive spin here, folks. Hopefully we profiteers give to charity – that’s about it.