The Hidden Costs of Buying on the Cheap

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/18/us/the-hidden-costs-of-buying-on-the-cheap.html

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NEW YORK — The Children’s Place, a clothing-store chain, has acknowledged sourcing from the Bangladeshi factory complex that collapsed last month and killed more than 1,100 people. But far from the rubble, on a slow day at a store in the Flatlands section of Brooklyn, the faraway deaths had yet to inspire a new awareness about the people who stitch the $4 “Royal Cutie” T-shirts, $9 floral onesies and $10 blue plaid shorts.

“They don’t really let us know where the clothes are made,” a Children’s Place saleswoman said, handling wares whose labels disclose only countries — Vietnam, China, Bangladesh. “I guess that’s not really our business. We just sell them.”

Mysterious origins are a hidden cost of cheap things. To spend a day in the diverse stores of New York — from the working-class area of Flatlands to the gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope to the moneyed Upper East Side — is to encounter yet another line dividing the prosperous from the poor.

To have money today is often to acquire the right to know which person knitted your sweater or which farm bred the pigs in your chorizo. To be without money is to buy from a placeless netherworld and be told to take it or leave it, no questions asked.

It’s a strange reversal. For most of history, the poor would have eaten the local pigs and known the origin of their socks, and the rich had better access to a global marketplace. But changing elite tastes and the relentless efficiency of supply chains have slowly inverted tastes: In many categories, the poor now buy from the exotic unknown, and the rich insist on what can be traced, from the pig next door to the locally sewn sock.

At the Payless Shoesource down the street from The Children’s Place, origins are hidden — under the tongues of shoes, or inside where the ankles lurk. “They all say ‘Made in China,”’ a saleswoman says, when asked about the shoes’ manufacture. “That I know. But they don’t tell us anything else.”

Now get on the No. 5 train and get off 17 stops later at 59th Street, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

Walk into The Art of Shaving on Madison Avenue, whose Fusion Engraved Nickel Plated Shaving Set costs $600. If, when the clerk offers help, you decline and say you’re browsing, she might insist nonetheless. She offers an origin story about the husband and wife who sold their car for $12,000 and started this store — with this as their first location of dozens. Rich products, like rich people, have histories; poor products only have pasts.

At the Barneys department store nearby, walk up to the woman at the Delvaux counter, selling pricey leather accessories. She will volunteer that her brand is eight years older than Hermès; that the goods are made in a factory in Brussels; that this one is lizard skin, and that one ostrich. In an alcove around the corner are the products of the Maison Goyard, a maker of bags and trunks. Like many products for the wealthy, Goyard announces its origins — Paris — on the logo of the product rather than hidden away. On some, Goyard includes an address: 233 rue Saint-Honoré.

Over in Park Slope, at the fancy Bklyn Larder provisions shop, it is much the same. Because it caters to the moneyed classes now migrating to Brooklyn, everything must be from somewhere. It’s not hidden in labels, but right out front: New Hampshire cider, Ithaca milk yogurt, cheese-and-pecan crackers in which the cheese is from Bravo Farms in California and the pecans are from New Mexico.

Four blocks away, the Key Food supermarket, catering more to the neighborhood’s less-affluent old guard than its newcomers, is less forthcoming with detail. The food is mostly from nowhere.

It often seems to be from somewhere. The label may say “Bolthouse Farms,” without mentioning that it’s not a farm so much as a vast business owned by the Campbell Soup Co. When places are cited, they are often no more specific than “Product of U.S.A.” The sweet mixed pickles, less than half the price per unit of similar ones at Larder, offer no more history than to say that they are distributed by Key Food.

When the buck stops at Key Food, it tends to stop no further back than the distributor.

Back at The Children’s Place, Marsha Toombs was browsing the racks. She is 30 and pregnant with her third child. Her daughter was cruising the clothes, full of requests: “Mommy, can I have a purse? Ooh, Mommy, can I have these shorts?”

Ms. Toombs was disturbed by events in Bangladesh. “Me personally, I don’t agree with the outsourcing,” she said. She blamed it for a dearth of jobs in America, and for giving low-income foreigners a devil’s bargain — either don’t eat, or labor in danger.

Why, then, was she buying these clothes? She struggled. “That’s where it gets really tricky, because if the economy is bad and things are tight financially, you’ve got to bargain,” she said. “I guess — man — that’s where the dilemma comes into play.”

How much extra would she pay — say, for the $15 jeans in her cart — to have them made closer to home, in better conditions?

“See, I’m a bargain queen,” she said, hesitating. She settled on $5 extra and no more. And she wasn’t convinced about the jeans, either: “I’m going to go to Target and see if I can get something cheaper.”

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