A Stitch in Time (parte II)

“For many commentators, a book about the future of the U.S. apparel and textile industries is still an oxymoron. The conventional wisdom paints a grim picture of where these industries are headed. Low-cost labor overseas and the increasing penetration of imports have certainly undercut American apparel manufacturers; apparel imports grew rapidly in most categories starting in the mid-1970s.
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As one consequence, the number of business failures among U.S. apparel manufacturers climbed from 227 in 1975 to a high of 567 in 1993.
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The conventional wisdom explains the industry's decline in this way: Apparel, particularly women's apparel, is driven by price-based competition among generally small manufacturing and contracting establishments. Labor costs represent a significant portion of cost for many garment categories, and U.S. wage levels far exceed those of competitors in countries like the People's Republic of China and Mexico.
Although the magnitude of these differences varies as exchange rates fluctuate, under any realistic exchange-rate scenario, the labor cost differential is sufficiently high to put U.S. manufacturers at a very significant competitive disadvantage.”
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Esta é a conversa ao nível do Forum TSF ou, como escreveu Ortega y Gasset, ideias apresentadas sem a capacidade de idear.
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O que poucos são capazes de perceber é a oportunidade:
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"Although the production of basic white dress shirts may lend itself to a price/cost analysis, this "staple" good, like many staple goods, now constitutes only a small proportion of all shirt production: by 1986, little more than 20 percent of men's dress shirts were white. This one-time staple has been replaced by shirts of dizzying diversity in fabric, design, and style, providing the final consumer with a huge assortment of shirts while exposing retailers and manufacturers to increased risk of holding large volumes of unsold goods. Classical economic assumptions about market competition are not directly applicable in this situation, even in a "mature" industry like apparel."
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Trechos retirados de  "A stitch in time : lean retailing and the transformation of manufacturing—lessons from the apparel and textile industries" de Frederick H. Abernathy, John T. Dunlop, Janice H. Hammond e David Weil.