>What happens if truly nobody wants those clothes
In theory companies would eventually be forced to produce less items nobody wants, although this is just an additional incentive in that natural process.
>What happens if truly nobody wants those clothes
In theory companies would eventually be forced to produce less items nobody wants, although this is just an additional incentive in that natural process.
That doesn't really make sense, losing your whole investment is already a strong incentive to not produce something you can't sell.
Assume the legislation is trying to reduce a real problem. Why does that problem exist if that incentive is actually really strong in practice?
I assume it's not actually a really strong incentive in context.
> Assume the legislation is trying to reduce a real problem
Why assume that? Could you not imagine that legislation is often meant to signal values to voters as much or more than it is intended to solve real problems.
> Why assume that? Could you not imagine that legislation is often meant to signal values to voters as much or more than it is intended to solve real problems.
You mean something like, to signal to voters they're trying to solve a problem voters want changed? Or a problem voters say they have?
I didn't mean to imply it would fix the problem, or that the problem would be fixed. Just that there's desire for [thing targeted], is something enough people would want to change.
I also said "assume that" for the sake of the argument/discussion given you started by saying you didn't understand. I say it's trivial to understand if assume there are other incentives where destroying the product is desirable. Thus making the incentive you mentioned, not very strong, (in context).
EU regulations aren’t set by people who are directly elected though, so the incentives are really weird. It seems like largely a non-problem, the likes of which gets obsessed over by the types of also ran politicians who end up as members of the European Parliament or filtering into the Brussels bureaucracy.
Call me when they stop buying Russian gas.
A factory might have a minimum order quantity of 10000 units for a product. The products cost $1 landed.
You know you can sell 4000 of those products for a total of $15k.
This might become a bad deal if dealing with the 6000 extra units costs you money.
maybe this will force factories to change their process. with manufacturing getting cheaper, smaller batches become affordable. at the extreme we can now print books on demand, and improved 3D printing allows one-off items in many more areas. that's the trend we need to push. to get away from wasteful mass production.
Push how? Through regulation? Unclear how else you’d achieve this if it is still worse economically. Buyers don’t want to pay more either.
through demand at first. clothes designers are hopefully going to demand smaller batches to avoid getting punished for overproducing. but if that doesn't work, then yes, maybe regulation is necessary. tricky though because manufacturing is often outside of the EU.
overproduction needs to be made more uneconomical than smaller batches. if that is really the issue. i really doubt that large batches of production are actually the problem here.
How much longer do you wait to see if demand solves it? It hasn't. The problem has gotten worse
You can produce so little people take anything you give them - like it was in the Soviet union.
Clothing has a huge profit margin (when manufactured overseas) especially at the higher end (for brands which do not invest in local production, which is most, because it is also hard to beat Chinese quality). It's better for these brands to over-produce on some items and lose the low-cost inventory, than to under-produce and not meet market demand, to not offer a range of sizes and varieties to meet individual taste, and not achieve wide distribution that's necessary to grow market demand. That's why regulation is needed here.
I get he economics, but I don’t think it follows that it’s a problem governments need to involve themselves in.
What’s your big idea
Do nothing here, because it’s probably not a real problem. There’s opportunity cost in spending time on nonsense.
You might not think that, but EU citizens think otherwise.
Did they vote for the bureaucrats in Brussels that wrote the regulation?
Irrelevant. If you want to put it that way, USians don't vote for their president either.
I would think the incentives to produce things no one wants would already be pretty low.
Supplier MOQs can create significant incentives to overproduce. For example, you get 9000 things someone wants and 1000 that no-one wants.
This can be profitable for the customer, if they can't just easily get rid of those 1000 they can't sell, it's presumably less profitable.
Presumably the split between things people want and do not want is not known a priori. It seems the EU is trying to legislate into an existence a solution to an unsolvable equation.
Not really, the EU is just introducing additional weighing in favor of smaller order quantities.
They are -- so I hope Europeans will remember this when they have more trouble finding the size and color they need. If you can't throw anything away you do have to underproduce to avoid being stuck with crap that no one wants, is illegal to throw away, and can't even be recycled (because that would be 'destroying' the clothes, wouldn't it?)
So you have to underproduce always, and maybe not even make things that aren't a safe bet to sell out.
You can just donate them. If no one will take them, you are in fact allowed to destroy the products when it's "the option with the least negative environmental impacts".
Overproducing is often cheaper than losing sales because of the fixed costs of producing a batch and the externalities of destroying your inventory not being priced in. Some brands also find it more interesting to destroy stocks than reduce prices because it protects their brand values. Well, now, that's illegal.
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