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Return Culture

Wearing clothes for social media sounds like a very odd predilection. Specially that the said clothes have no use beyond being a picture on Instagram. The return culture stemming from such is encouraged by retailers. When you add try before you buy to this, retailers allow shoppers to borrow their wardrobe at low cost and if they are smart even for free. A lot of ink is spilled on consumer behavior or how it changes over time with some trends too powerful to reverse.

 At the root of all this misery is the the notion of building a better mouse-trap to ensnare the feckless consumer. So retailers play around with different inducements to see what we might bite. If they trap us they may command our loyalty at least for a while - eventually we escape anyway. All the while we gorge on freebies that someone way down the food-chain is paying for in the form of longer work hours, depressed wages and no benefits. That is the cost of our collective desire to look spiffy everyday on Instagram.

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