Underwear economics

How to read the current state of the world economy in your underwear and how to change it

For many years now I have gauged the state of the world economy by looking at and in my underwear.

The quality of the material is a good indication of how low the clothes stores are prepared to go before their customers complain but more to the point by looking at the label you will see where the clothes were produced. I cannot remember a time when ‘Made in the UK’ was printed in the label. This is because in order to get cheap clothing you pay cheap wages and where you pay cheap wages is where the poorest people live. Simple global economics.

Part of the practice of Mindfulness when eating is to reflect upon the food you are about to eat and the process by which it arrived on your plate. Someone somewhere tilled a field, someone planted a seed, someone watered the seed and tended the crop, they then harvested the crop washed it packed it and shipped it, it was taken from the dock sent to a factory for re-packaging transported to the supermarket and nowadays was probably delivered straight to your door. You pour out your breakfast Muesli and before you know it you have eaten the whole bowl without giving a second thought to the huge amount of effort it has taken to get there unless of course you are being Mindful. This is the reality of interconnectedness, or interbeing, an underpinning philosophy in Buddhism.

Reflect on underwear for a moment, preferably your own, and you should be able to appreciate the same thing as with the food. Perhaps you need to add in to the process sweat shops, child labour, a lack of health and safety, migrant workers never seeing their families. I won’t go on but you get the picture. Of course no one wants to do this. In the same way no one wants to think of children being poisoned mining rare chemicals for their mobile phones or rivers being polluted in order to extract minerals for other products.

Some years ago my wife and I went to Vietnam and as always when you go to developing countries your guide proudly shows you things you would rather not see. In our case it started with ‘wet markets’ in one of the main cities where live animals were packaged in wire crates or tied together so they couldn’t move. We asked to leave within minutes of arriving and then we were taken to a ‘factory’ where garden pots were made. This was more palatable than the former but was just as shocking in a different way. Those glazed pots you buy in a garden centre are not mass produced, well not in the way you think. In a gloomy and desperately hot industrial building large and very heavy slabs of wet clay are manually slapped into workable sheets by men who have harder muscles than Bruce Lee ever had and yet earn less in their whole lives than he probably earned in a day. They work the clay hour after hour, day after day, for next to nothing and we go into the garden centre and think twice about paying a relatively small amount for them. Unless you visit the places where things are made or grown you do not know what goes into producing them and most people are happy to live with this lack of knowledge. To paraphrase that old saying ‘what the mind doesn’t know the heart doesn’t grieve about.’

The question is how do we change underwear economics?

I have been giving this some thought during the Covid crisis and I am beginning to formulate some ideas.

The UK government is currently negotiating trade deals which may lead to a drop in our current EU food standards, it may well agree to other deals that allow imported goods without the same rigorous adherence to health and safety standards.

Social media is full of petitions posted by individuals and organisations desperately trying to stop this happening but inevitably they will fail and things will go ahead because the UK needs a deal. So what can the individual do?

Well those who can afford to do otherwise don’t have to buy cheap clothing which is produced just to satisfy throw away fashion. We don’t have to buy phones that involve extortionate child labour, and those who eat meat don’t have to buy chlorinated chicken.

Ah…but here’s the rub as Shakespeare would say, not everybody can afford to shop in such an upmarket way. There are more and more people using food banks and charity shops going day to day just trying to feed the children of the family.

Believe me, I understand this but something has to change somewhere and it may as well begin with those who can afford to change their ways. Then when that has been accomplished things can change elsewhere.

How does this happen?

During lockdown home deliveries have rocketed. My feeling is that having become used to it many shoppers will continue to have their food delivered. This opens the door for the supermarkets to adjust their web sites to offer an individually customer tailored site.

Customer profiling has been used by supermarkets for many years in order to target buyers to get more sales. Loyalty cards are a part of life nowadays for many people, effectively the shoppers data is gathered and used by the supermarkets and in return customers get a discount. They may not realise that their data is worth money or that this is the model behind ‘loyalty’ cards but it is.

Supposing this established technique was turned on its head? Supposing as a customer I said to my regular grocery store, this is my profile:

You may be saying ‘they wont do that, it is too much hard work.’

Well look at it this way, they want your custom, they will be gathering far more data about your preferences and at the end of the day as I have already said, data means money. They have the information in their systems necessary to personalise the web site e.g. where produce comes from, how far it has travelled etc., and think of this how many people are becoming allergic to specific additives in produce, wouldn’t the supermarket that has cracked this issue have the advantage over other supermarkets?

There are sound economic reasons for supermarkets to seriously look into this model, especially if means maintaining a sound loyal customer base.

Ethical shopping needs to be more than this but it would be a start and a start is all that is needed.

I have focussed on food shopping to begin with, but how about clothes, household goods, non renewable products etc? What about deliveries? In the future I don’t want my purchases delivered by non electric vehicles thanks.

I believe that if we are to get away from a situation where multinational companies dictate to us then we need to use consumer power to do this. We need to turn consumption into ethical consumption and make the companies selling to us do the work to ensure what we are buying is produced ethically. After all are they working for us or are we working for them?

As individuals we can always take steps to buy well, but there needs to be a groundswell that shifts the balance from being sold to, to being listened to and that can only happen if we begin to shop in a different way.

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