On the other end, I’m also surprised by the “one-year” thing: most of my clothes are more than five-year-old and they are fine. For underwear and t-shirts, I typically wear them once a week.
Because these are the minority of clothes despite being used by the majority of people in the example I gave, changing the timeframe doesn't really change the average. Changing the example to use a 5 year timeframe, for instance, only changes the average to 4.92.
> not 20% of the population
Right, and it also ought to be less than 80% that buys clothes no more often than once per year or per 5 years. Both extremes are exaggerated to not have to insert more tiers than needed into the example.
Anyway, it's just an example to show how that number can be easily influenced by a small minority. The real numbers are going to be different.
As an example, say 8 out of 10 people have 7 sets of clothes, one for each day of the week, and use the same sets for a whole year. The remaining 2 out of 10 use a new set of clothes every day, so they go through 365 sets of clothes in a year. That comes to clothes being used an average of 4.64 times: