How warehouses for personal junk became a $38B industry

Re:How warehouses for personal junk became a $38B industry by michaelbuckbee on Thursday March 29, 2018 @12:26PM (#16708324)

Modern manufacturing is sufficiently weird that it messes with my sense of thriftiness. That it really is possible to manufacture new items less expensively than it is to repair them (especially counting my own time to do so).

Like I can remember my grandmother knitting and darning socks.

But she wished she had one of these sock knitting machines:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7N7hsho4Sjg&feature=youtu.be...

And now you can buy a 10 pack of decent socks for $1/pair (and they may objectively be of higher quality).

I'm trying to think how I'd even explain this to someone from another time:

"10% of your net worth is this pair of socks? And they took you a day each to make? I just threw away a pair because my toe poked through the top."

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Re:How warehouses for personal junk became a $38B industry by doomlaser on Thursday March 29, 2018 @01:28PM (#16708986)

I was shocked and pleasantly surprised recently at $3 high quality plain tshirts (in multiple colors) that you can order online: http://www.michaels.com/apparel-crafts/t-shirts/876004921

I'm wearing a magenta one now.. Then I found out there are tons of online outfits doing this. https://www.jiffyshirts.com/

I've always shopped at Salvation Army and other thrift stores, with occasional trips to malls to pick up Levi's Slim Straight jeans, but the last pair of those I bought from Amazon since I know my size. It's kind of been a revelation, and the big box stores are going to have to get creative to stay around I think. I used to be picky about favoring American Apparel shirts as well, in their heydey, but the ones I got from Michaels are surprisingly good.

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Re:How warehouses for personal junk became a $38B industry by Cyph0n on Thursday March 29, 2018 @06:00PM (#16711467)

I only realized how big this market really is when I found out that Berkshire Hathaway owns Fruit of the Loom, a Gildan competitor.

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Re:How warehouses for personal junk became a $38B industry by chiefalchemist on Thursday March 29, 2018 @06:44PM (#16711860)

Funny enough, I think I've seen them on sale for less than $3.

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Re:How warehouses for personal junk became a $38B industry by dustycowboy on Friday March 30, 2018 @08:15AM (#16715465)

This reminds me of this quote from historian Carlo Cipolla in Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now:

"In preindustrial Europe, the purchase of a garment or of the cloth for a garment remained a luxury the common people could only afford a few times in their lives. One of the main preoccupations of hospital administration was to ensure that the clothes of the deceased should not be usurped but should be given to lawful inheritors. During epidemics of plague, the town authorities had to struggle to confiscate the clothes of the dead and to burn them: people waited for others to die so as to take over their clothes—which generally had the effect of spreading the epidemic." (Excerpt from Carlo Cipolla, 1994)

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