Biggest SECRETS of The Retail Industry

There are certain things which retail industry never wants you to know. Below are some of them.

Check Out The Rear

If you’re a frequent mall shopper, you may have noticed that in many cases the best clearance deals can be found at the back of the store. Sure, you might think that they just want to put the best new items up front, and that the older stuff which is on clearance should rightly be at the back for the store, but the real reason behind this is actually a little more nefarious than that. You see, the retailers want you to have to walk past all the more expensive items before they finally allow you to see the things which are more heavily discounted.

So if you want to save a little money, try walking straight to the back of the store and shopping from the rear to the front.

Unsold Clothes Are Destroyed

What do you do when you’re a high class fashion brand with a lot of name recognition behind your logo, but a particular run of clothes doesn’t do well in the stores? After all, shelves full of unsold clothes can weaken the strength of your brand in the eyes of consumers by making them wonder if it’s no longer fashionable to wear that brand.

Sure, you could donate the clothes to the needy, but it wouldn’t exactly do good things for your brand to have the lower class or homeless sporting your latest trend. So what do you do? Well, in the case of many brands, you have the retailers destroy the unsold garments.

For instance, in the recent past H&M as well as Wal-Mart have both been exposed for carrying out this practice. Dumpsters behind the stores were found stuffed with garbage bags which were themselves filled to the brim with unsold clothes which had been slashed with razor blades.

Theft Is Rampant

 In just about every industry, there’s some measure of corporate espionage and reproduction of ideas based on what a competitor has success with. But this is especially bad in the fashion industry.

The major brands watch each other closely to see what will catch on with their customers. When there seems to be a predominant trend, in most cases the other brands will work to produce their own versions of the successful product.

This may seem like simple, basic capitalism, but in many cases it essentially amounts to piracy and intellectual property infringement.

Nevertheless, this happens on a regular basis, and it’s apparently a good thing. Studies have shown that this type of cutthroat competition has resulted in all brands doing better - including those from which ideas have been stolen. This has become known as the “piracy paradox”.

Discounts Don’t Really Exist

Most people like a good deal, even if they don’t particularly care about the money they’re spending. This has led to a massive upswing in the popularity of so-called fashion outlet stores, where shoppers can find name brand clothing at huge markdowns due to the trends being slightly outdated or the items having incorrect sizes or other small defects.

In reality, though, you’re just buying clothes which were purposefully made to be cheap at these kinds of stores. It turns out that when fashion companies figured out people really liked going to discount outlets, they started making cheaper versions of their clothes specifically for these kinds of stores. So you’re not really getting a discount so much as just paying for clothes which aren’t as good anyway.

Your Clothes Are Toxic

You probably avoid buying food which might harm your family. You also probably know to watch out for keeping harsh chemicals in your home, or buying lead-based paints.

However, have you ever thought to check if these kinds of chemicals are being used in your clothes? We’re guessing you probably haven’t. As it turns out, though, this can definitely be the case. Apparently lead is a common ingredient in the pigments used to make brightly colored fashion items, from clothing to accessories like shoes and purses.

The brighter the items, the more likely they are to contain a high amount of lead. This means that your expensive, high end fashion statement for the summer just might get you sick, so be aware of this risk.

Models Are Poorly Paid

You’d probably expect that fashion models are very well paid. The idea of high class goes hand in hand with most people’s vision of a fashion model - after all, they’re wearing high end designer clothes and sporting the latest trends at that.

However, apparently in many cases models are poorly compensated - if they’re paid at all. Veteran models of the industry have explained that young models are taken advantage of, since agencies will get them to work for “exposure” or just offer low compensation since most models would rather take a low paying job than not work at all.

In the cases of foreign models who are brought into the country to work, there are often cases of what essentially amounts to indentured servitude - the models “owe” the agencies for things like visa and travel expenses, and therefore their pay goes toward paying off that “debt”.

Made To Fail

It’s expected that manufacturers want you to keep buying things, so some measure of expendability is just a part of life when you’re a consumer. However, it may shock you to find that in the fashion industry, expendability isn’t just a factor - it’s the goal.

Name brands in fashion aren’t just expensive, they’re cheaply made. They’re specifically designed to fall apart after as little as a few washes, and the reason for this is pretty simple. It’s so that you’ll keep buying.

In the age of discount fashion, of name brands that are sold at steep discounts, these items are also made poorly not only to save on costs, but to ensure that consumers will continue to purchase more and more clothing.

Child Labor Is Real

Here in the western world, we don’t like to spend a lot of time thinking about what effect our consumer culture has on the rest of the world. But when it comes to the clothes we wear, that effect can be very real and very unsavory.

In the case of many clothes which are sold in first world countries, the clothes have a sordid history and come directly from third world countries where child labor is used.

You might be wondering how this is possible since child labor is illegal here in the United States, but sadly this is not the case in many parts of the world.

Clothing manufacturers outsource their production to these countries because labor is dirt cheap in comparison to the western world, and this is how they are able to provide clothes for such low prices on this side of the Atlantic.

Corners Are Cut Everywhere

They say the devil is in the details. But in the retail industry, the devil may really be in the lack of detail. Take, for instance, your bath and bedroom supplies.

At Wal-Mart, you may be happy to buy a store brand bed set because it saves you as much as 50% over the name brand of a comparable quality. But are you really saving money? Maybe not, if you consider that the Wal-Mart brand is probably made out of a microfiber polyester blend, instead of pure cotton. Or that the Wal-Mart brand actually comes with fewer items in the set than the name brand.

You won’t notice this unless you pay attention though, since the store brands likely have as few details about the product as possible displayed on the package. Still, you might decide that this isn’t such a big deal.

Well you may change your mind in a few months, when your brand new comforter starts fraying at the ends or developing holes, because the fabric blend is far cheaper and suffers wear and tear quite a bit more than if you’d shelled out a few extra bucks up front.

You’re Already Out Of Style

The fashion conscious often worry about staying in style - you put all that work into refreshing your wardrobe, and already you’re behind by a season. But what you may not realize is that this is done on purpose, and you’re out of vogue long before you even realize it.

In fact, many companies in the fashion industry recognize up to 52 “micro-seasons” throughout the year. If you’re keeping track, you’ll know that this is the same number of weeks that there are in a year. Yes, they expect you to buy new clothes each and every week if you want to stay in style. This marketing ploy is called “Fast Fashion”, and it sees both outlet stores and designer stores getting new shipments every single day. This means that pretty much no matter what you do, there’s just no way for you to keep up with the latest trends.

Genetically Modified Clothes

Keeping up with the demand for more and more clothes is a real issue when it comes to sourcing the materials. Natural plants just don’t have a quick enough turn around time for most manufacturers who operate on a global scale.

As a result, they often turn to genetically modified solutions. Today, the vast majority of clothes make use of GMO cotton at least, and many brands blend GMO fabrics and sometimes even plastics to come up with their individual type of fabric. Additionally, harsh pesticides are used in the growth of these plants, which can stay on the materials even after they are harvested.

This may seem like no big deal, until you realize that these materials often have a drastic impact both on the people who handle them in the factories and the environments where they are grown. According to some researchers, as many as 77 million cotton workers are affected adversely and even poisoned each and every year as a result of these practices.

Designer Exclusives Aren’t So Great

A recent trend in the fashion and retail industry is to have exclusive clothing lines with the name of some famous person in the fashion industry applied to them. This builds a sense of confidence in the brand and adds value where it wouldn’t otherwise exist.

Good examples of this are the Vera Wang line of clothing sold at Kohl’s or Jason Wu which is sold at Target. Even bigger name brands such as Ivanka Trump’s line of clothing are examples of this kind of marketing.

The problem with this is that in most cases, the person whose name is on the garment isn’t even affiliated with the item except in that they are paid for the right to have their name and face featured on it.

Most of these lines feature clothing which is made as cheaply as possible for mass distribution, and the so-called savings is really only experienced by the manufacturer.

Who Controls Style?

Did the chicken come first, or the egg? Did the fashion trend come first, or the clothing line which promotes that trend?

This is a question which is difficult to answer in a world of guerrilla marketing campaigns designed to target the minds of consumers without those consumers even realizing it’s happening. Is that celebrity wearing that top because she thinks it’s cool, or because she’s being paid to do so?

In reality, many of the trends we see in stores today are promoted by the manufacturers themselves, and most of the time the reason they promote those trends is because it’s cheaper to make clothes that way.

Take, for instance, the trend toward solid color, dyed skinny jeans and leggings we’ve seen today. Where did this trend come from?

That could be hard to say, but one thing is for certain - using less material and only having to dye the item one color is a lot cheaper for the manufacturer.

Try Going Left

What side to you enter your favorite outlet store on? When you get into the store, which way to do you go? If you’re like most of the population, the honest answer to those questions is probably “right” in both cases. This isn’t your fault, though - it’s conditioning.

Most people in the world are right handed, and as a result our world is right-oriented. Retailers have noticed this, though, and that’s why you’re likely to find more tempting and irresistible deals on your right-hand side when you walk into the store. They want you to load up your cart right away, so they try to push you in that direction.

If you want to try to break out of that mindset, just try shopping from left to right instead and see where it takes you.

Fashion Pollutes The World

Another substantial cost of the quick fashion turnaround that we try to avoid addressing is the environmental impact of our purchases. More demand means that supply chains are pushed harder and harder, and the concern for protecting the environment become less important in the wake of record profits.

Fashion mogul Eileen Fisher says that the fashion industry is the second largest source of manmade pollution in the world, second only to the harvesting and production of oil.

Luckily in 2017 many brands have taken it upon themselves to attempt to fix this problem - Adidas is pioneering a way to create nylon-based shoes from recycled bottles, for instance - but it may not be enough.