Skip to main content

Common Sense Challenge

Egregious is the only word that comes to mind reading this NYT story about Walmart and
H & M slashing their unsold clothes before throwing them away to make sure no one gets to use them. Forget about being a good corporate citizen or giving back to the community, this even flies in the face of common sense.

If they have no use for it and will trash clothes (that armies of underpaid, over-worked workers in third world sweat-shops had helped produce), it would seem logical that they would give it away to anyone who could use it. Clearly the solution is not nearly as obvious.

There is certain maliciousness about this thing - it is as if they don't care as much about the losses as they do about frustrating would-be free-loaders that refused to buy that stuff even at 90% mark-downs. The idea is perhaps to teach them a lesson on the consequences of not buying when they had a chance to. If they set such a precedent, penny pinching customers might wait it out until they can get their clothes for free from the dumpster. To that end, they cut off their nose to spite their face.

“The H & M thing was just ridiculous, not only clothing, but bags and bags of sturdy plastic hangers,” Ms. Magnus said. “I took a dozen of them. A girl can never have enough hangers.”

H &  M, which is based in Sweden, has an executive in charge of corporate responsibility who leads the company’s sustainability efforts. On its Web site, H&M reports that to save paper, it has shrunk its shipping labels.

Talk about left hand not knowing what the right is doing. Smaller shipping labels to be green while slashed clothing on their plastic hangers are being dumped in trash. Makes you wonder if corporations are not schizophrenic along with being psychopathic.

Comments

LIFE_REFACTORED said…
They couild have at least given it off to salvation army

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques