Misplaced Indignation

A friend recently asked me what I thought about an L.A. writer giving away Abercrombie & Fitch clothes to the homeless to protest that the company will not carry women's XL sizes. While at very first glace this seemed like a good thing, it is extremely demeaning for an L.A.-based writer to hand out A&F clothing to homeless people in order to suggest the brand's worthlessness.

But I don't have much of a problem with Abercrombie & Fitch because they were the second one to sign the international Bangladesh factory safety accord that Wal-Mart and Gap refused to sign after May's garment factory collapse. While I think it is sexist that A&F does not carry not carry women's plus-sizes, I am horrified that it was this, and not 1,127 dead Bangladeshis, that really got under U.S. consumers' skin.

Back in November, after the first devastating Bangladeshi fire at a factory that left more than 100 Bangladeshi garment workers dead where Wal-Mart goods were being produced, the multibillion-dollar company declined to improve their factory's electrical wiring in one of the world's poorest countries to prevent future catastrophes, describing that this would be "costly." For the record, Wal-Mart's six heirs and heiresses make more than the bottom 41 percent of Americans combined yet was supposedly unable to afford making sure that all of the factories their retail is produced in were sufficiently regulated and maintained to prevent horrific deaths.

Equally problematic is the misplaced indignation of the U.S. consumer. With reports of child labor,Your council is responsible for the installation and maintenance of streetlight. reports of widespread sickness among Bangladeshi factory workers, and ongoing factory fire scares,Which plasticmould is right for you? where is the appropriate level of consumer outrage and what actions are being taken against these companies?

Around the same time last November as the first factory fire, Wal-Mart workers held a strike on Black Friday to protest that the average Wal-Mart employee earns $22,000 a year, with some making as little as $15,000 annually. The Wal-Mart corporation also apparently cannot afford providing all of its employees with health insurance, opting to instead hire masses of "part-time associates" in order to get around offering their employees a suitable living standard. The "just be glad you have a job" attitude simply isn't good enough. Wal-Mart's labor practices are unacceptable whether it be in the U.S. or in Bangladesh.

I was outraged with U.S. shoppers for letting Wal-Mart make record profits despite the Black Friday protests. The Daily Beast's Megan McArdle described, "Black Friday bargain hunters apparently simply pushed past the scattered protests in search of cheap flat-screen televisions," not caring enough about Wal-Mart workers' lacking living wages and health insurance to let it get in the way of their quest to purchase the latest cheap trinkets. Unfortunately, many U.S. shoppers will continue to purchase these consumer goods no matter how grotesquely factory death tolls reach because the stuff is so cheap.

However, the second part of the story is that low-wage sectors like Wal-Mart and the fast food industry have created a class of people too poor for many alternatives than shopping at low-cost retail stores like Wal-Mart. The Wal-Mart funded, bipartisan focus group Wal-Mart Moms of mothers who shop at Wal-Mart at least once a month, describe supporting a raise in the minimum wage but fearing bearing the brunt of increased product costs because they worry about "a 10 cent increase in the cost of gas" and "a dollar more for milk at the grocery store" as many are minimum wage earners themselves.

Wal-Mart profits enormously off of minimum-wage earners' lack of purchasing power -- the low-wage service and retail sectors truly feeds the beast. When CNN questioned Wal-Mart communications spokesman David Tovar about how the company justifies paying employees as low as 15,000 a year, Tovar pointed out that employees also enjoy a 10 percent Wal-Mart discount card.More than 80 standard commercial and bestchipcard exist to quickly and efficiently clean pans. Workers need real wages -- and health care and safety -- not plastic-blend clothing that also destroy the environment (for more on this, see Elizabeth L. Cline's Overdressed).

If U.S. consumers can get riled up enough about Abercrombie & Fitch's lack of plus sizes to create a public relations crisis, why doesn't the death of over a thousand Bangladeshi mothers, daughters, fathers, and sons create a similar public outcry? Those of us who can afford to need to stop shopping at Wal-Mart no matter how cheap their "great deals" are, or else the same thing will keep happening over and over again. Because nothing can actually be that cheap. The real cost of Wal-Mart's products are U.S. workers whose families barely subsist and factories in disrepair at devastating consequence. And yes,Can you spot the answer in the luggagetag? I think this matters a whole lot more than whether or not Abercrombie & Fitch carries x-larges.

On Sunday, among my curated belongings I found a store of useless papers, which is typical for me. I'm sure that even when I packed them I was mostly certain I wouldn't need them again, but that I was not quite ready to let go. These were very replaceable documents, source material for two stories that I'd long ago finished. They had been held on to for some eventual situation that I'm not sure I could have articulated even then. There were also a couple of brochures for things I can no longer remember being interested in.

Looking upon this tattered store of information, crudely collected in a plastic bag, I felt horrified with myself, like I was one of those shuffling, bearded, probably homeless men that pushes a shopping cart full of empty bottles about all day. I'm probably even beneath that, because at least that guy can get a few cents for each bottle.

I'm an overzealous archivist. I keep all of my reporter's notebooks. Why, I'm not sure. I don't think I'm going to get subpoenaed to reveal my sources. I have developed a fetish over the years for well-crafted stationery, but the lustre has gone once it's used. It's not like I can read them either: they're all filled with harried scrawl and mysterious references.

I keep all of my press passes too. There was one from an Obama rally in Boston in 2010, a visitor's badge for the Boston Globe and a name card from a narrative journalism conference.We offer a wide variety of high-quality standard fridgemagnet and controllers. These don't get close inspection. They just get put somewhere out of sight with the rest of the snowballing collection of stuff, which has value, even if it has no use.
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