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Clothing stores feel sharp economic pinch
High fuel, food prices crimping spending on apparel
Allison Linn, MSNBC
After years of routinely asking consumers what they think of the coming fashion season, it would seem that nothing could surprise C. Britt Beemer. But this year, when Beemer asked women to rate spring clothes, he got an unexpected response – 50 percent of women said they hadn’t even noticed what’s in store windows.
“That tells you how the consumer is not even focused on apparel,” said Beemer, who studies consumer behavior as head of America’s Research Group. “Shoppers, and particularly female shoppers, have just not put apparel on their radar screen.”
If rising food and fuel prices aren’t exactly getting you in the mood to hit the mall for a new spring outfit, you’re not alone.
Clothing retailers are facing a double whammy of drooping consumer interest – fueled by economic woes – coupled with their own rising costs for raw materials such as cotton, fuel to transport goods and even labor in China.
(25 April 2008)
The end of cheap clothes is near
Jorn Madslien, BBC News
Food prices have shot up in response to a surge in crop prices. Now consumers should get ready for clothes prices to follow suit.
Garment makers are seeing demand shrink as consumers in the US and Europe are cutting back on spending.
US cotton consumption is set to fall 6.5% from last year to less than a million tonnes whilst EU consumption is expected to fall 11% to about 460,000 tonnes, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) predicts.
At the same time, they are hit by more expensive raw materials and by soaring oil prices, which make their factories more expensive to operate and which pushes up the cost of shipping to foreign markets.
In India, the weaving industry is in crisis. In China, the textile sector is squeezed.
And, yet again, the root cause of their problems can be found in America.
In the US, ever more cotton farmers are switching to more lucrative crops – soybeans, corn, and wheat – whose market prices are rising even faster.
(23 April 2008)
Contributor CP writes:
Peak cotton, what else have we missed?
For Many, Thrift Shops Are a Wardrobe Essential
Caitlin Kelly, New York Times
Sheena Massie, dragged by her mother to garage and estate sales as a child, once cringed at the sight of used goods.
“The very thought of being caught by my peers buying other people’s junk was mortifying,” said Ms. Massie, a 25-year-old waitress in Canal Winchester, Ohio, near Columbus. “If someone else didn’t want it, why would I?”
But, like Ms. Massie, who with her mother is opening a thrift shop, more consumers are concluding that brand new is not necessarily better.
According to the National Association of Resale and Thrift Shops, the industry is growing at a rate of 5 percent a year. And as the prices of gasoline and groceries edge higher and debt – be it mortgage or credit card – weighs more heavily, saving money on clothes, shoes and household goods has become increasingly essential for many people.
(26 April 2008)
Gardening In The Nude (or New Use For Rhubarb)
Gene Logsdon, Organic To Be
One of the greatest mysteries of life for me is society’s ambivalence about the naked human body. People line up by the hundreds every day to get a look at Michelangelo’s anatomically-correct statue of David. But if a real live David were to stand naked beside that statue, the sex police would haul him away, even in Italy where nude statues are as common as pizza.
I once did a lot of “research” into the subject of outdoor nudity. Research for a writer means I “asked around.” What gives here, anyway?
You’d be amazed. Actually most of you would not be amazed because what I found out was that most people, given their druthers, would not wear clothes in their back yards or even front yards, if they could get away with it, at least not when the weather is nice. People I asked drew the line only at going beyond the home environment unclothed or where the environment inclined excessively to poison ivy and mosquitoes. One person put it this way: “If everyone took their clothes off while they mowed the lawn, in twenty minutes no one would take a second look. If the nude person was as ugly as I am, no one would take a first look.”
I have a hunch that there are plenty of backyard swimming pools whose waters reflect bare backsides more than they do swimsuits. For sure what passes for a swimsuit in many of them would make a typical thong look kind of klutzy. But people also expressed a yen, if they trusted that I was not going to name names, for gardening in the nude. In fact the practice has been sanctified into folk tradition, at least in the Ozarks. According to folklorist Vance Randolph, writing in the 1930s and 40s, the spring planting ritual in the hills involved a sort of celebratory session of love making on the soft, loamy, newly-planted soil to insure a good crop. Some fifty years later, I asked an Ozarkian if people still did that. “Wellllll” (long pause). “Welllll” (another long pause). “Yes.” Did Ozarkians believe that such activity would enhance crop production? He smiled. “Oh, they just use that for an excuse.”
However, I don’t think that the yearning to go unclothed into the world, especially in the privacy of the garden, has much to do with sex. People just get tired of having their bodies bound and gagged by clothes all the time. My theory is that those lovely brick walls that enclose English gardens, especially those dating back to Victorian times, were built mainly to allow for nude gardening.
My favorite story on this subject comes from a Tennessee gardener when I asked him if he ever hoed in the nude. “Why do you think I live back a long lane, surrounded by 120 acres of my own property?” he replied. But even then it is risky, he acknowledged. “Once when I thought all the other members of the family were gone for the day, I decided to shed my clothes while I weeded the vegetables. All of a sudden here comes my wife down the lane with a carload of her friends. Oh boy. I thought about improvising a pair of shorts out of nearby rhubarb leaves but while I hid behind the plant, they left.”
My riddle for the day: can you really be 100% organic with clothes on?
(18 July 2007)
