Pick Up Post - Share Your Latest Purchases

Well all you mofos who won't play with toys, you're practically dead.

Planes, cars and tanks are awesome, you shall play with them or you are wholly irrelevant to our movement.

No prints of fish or anything. I must be delirious.

Also some vests.

Saint of Killers wrote:

No prints of fish or anything. I must be delirious.

Also some vests.

I don't buy much from Uniqlo these days. They put the price of their standard t-shirts up by a fiver and the sales aren't as cheap as they used to be.

Mafro wrote:

Saint of Killers wrote:

No prints of fish or anything. I must be delirious.

Also some vests.

I don't buy much from Uniqlo these days. They put the price of their standard t-shirts up by a fiver and the sales aren't as cheap as they used to be.

Yup. Writing was on the wall when free returns were cancelled / having to print your own return slip was introduced.

Some of the UT stuff will have prices of £20! (They'll be in the "greatest hits" range )

I've just realised all future UT ranges have the £20 price tag Even the children's range!

Ngh. Gonna have to be more selective about the few tees I liked the look of.

Saint of Killers wrote:I've just realised all future UT ranges have the £20 price tag

Vermilion wrote:

Saint of Killers wrote:I've just realised all future UT ranges have the £20 price tag

I was miffed when they went from... what was it? £12 to 14? £20 is just ridiculous.

Saint of Killers wrote:

Vermilion wrote:

Saint of Killers wrote:I've just realised all future UT ranges have the £20 price tag

I was miffed when they went from... what was it? £12 to 14? £20 is just ridiculous.

Yeah, used to be around £12.

I don't mean to be mean to anyone here but in general it is a huge problem with pile 'em high and sell 'em cheap AKA fast fashion models. They need to stop - now.

Hopefully they are spending some of that money making their business more sustainable.

Higher price, less excessive volume produced. Profit is the same. The garment printing industry creates 20% waste on average. That's how they are so cheap.

I know, I am one, but my waste is more like 0.05%.

They should not be that cheap and they should not overproduce. If you want 100 fashion printed T-shirts in your wardrobe, frankly, pay for it or wear the same clothes. If you are addicted to a thing printed on a thing, go to thrift or vintage stores and do the same thing without being entitled to 100% fresh crisp cotton items you can wear out of the bag.

The free returns change in the retail fashion sector was absolutely necessary. People were buying clothes, wearing them once on Instagram, and returning them. Or buying 5 sizes and possibly maybe keeping one. Measure yourself ffs. If it isn't a 100% perfect fit, get over yourself. Returning for free a £4-8 T-shirt? Seriously? Clothes are considered a necessity, repeatedly buying brand new fashion printed apparel is not.

It's horrible consumer culture and it's irresponsible production. No, you do not have a right to try on and return hundreds of T-shirts. Measure yourself and buy the right T-shirt. If it doesn't fit, go to a shop, give it to a friend, recycle it, donate it, it was probably 5 strawberry floating quid. Don't have the industry mandate that they should overproduce by a MINIMUM of 20% to meet that pointless need. This all goes without measuring the Co2 footprint of the logistics for repeatedly shipping and returning.

Think of the people sewing the garments, cultivating the cotton, and printing them. What the strawberry float is the point of all that if 20% of them are literally incinerated or thrown in the bin?

100% wrong commercial and personal policies regarding anyone who wants to buy cheap printed cotton brand new every couple of weeks for the rest of their life. A good quality printed T-shirt will hold its shape and wash well for upwards of 10 years, even if it's washed as many as 60 to 80 times or more. They are constructed that way. The dyes will fade, at a sensible 30 to 40 degree wash little else happens. If they're not, stop buying 100 shitty T-shirts instead of 10 good ones. Stop pulverising them with fabric softener and being too lazy to hang dry (and not burn more fuel in the tumble dryer). Wash them inside out. Wash them in a wash bag.

Whatever the strawberry float it is, just stop buying brand new T-shirts when the collar has a pucker in it, you get a single stain on it, your shirt turns from white to 90% white and this makes you sad for whatever the strawberry float reason, or some new anime gets a licensed print you could probably do yourself, difference being they went and had 100,000 of those things printed to satiate that ABSOLUTE NEEEEEED *triple fire emoji*, says the chorus of dickheads on Instagram with rooms full of cotton, probably representing the water consumption of a small lake and the lifetime of a cotton industry worker.

I only bought 1 t shirt recently, cost me £45 so I couldn't afford another anyways.

Uniqlo may be fast fashion but I wear the *absolute strawberry float* out of my clothes. Half the problem with fast fashion is the wear-once-buy-something-new culture. I am not guilty of that. The only ones I will not wear are ones where the print has started to fade (which is why I will now only buy all-over prints from Threadless - all their regular prints went to gooseberry fool after Nth number of washes) but everything else gets worn to death. And once I'm done with them I'll either sell them, give them away or rag them. I don't just bin them or whatever it is the likes of Boohoo buyers do with their clothes.

I have and had Carhartt t shirts for over 10 years. They always seem the best quality I've found, they can be expensive but they do last.

I wouldn't say Uniqlo is fast fashion either, my Uniqlo hoodie is several years old now and it's served me well.

I've said this before in her the last time the topic was brought up, but I'm still wearing Uniqlo stuff from ten years ago that's still in really, really good condition.

I wouldn't class Uniqlo as fast either.

Supermarket stuff and Primark, that's fast. I do buy cheapo t shirts from sainsburys and they don't last more than a year most of the time.

I generally wear my clothes until they reach the point where I could get arrested for obscenity.

Saint of Killers wrote::lol:

Uniqlo may be fast fashion but I wear the *absolute strawberry float* out of my clothes. Half the problem with fast fashion is the wear-once-buy-something-new culture. I am not guilty of that. The only ones I will not wear are ones where the print has started to fade (which is why I will now only buy all-over prints from Threadless - all their regular prints went to gooseberry fool after Nth number of washes) but everything else gets worn to death. And once I'm done with them I'll either sell them, give them away or rag them. I don't just bin them or whatever it is the likes of Boohoo buyers do with their clothes.

Yeah I wasn't talking directly to you btw. Because it's my work I think about these things all the time.

I found it interesting the discussion around prices going up, and sales being less deep cut and less frequent. Possibly signs the industry is trying to address some of these problems - and in some of the trade news sources etc I read, it is constantly a subject of discussion and fervour because of the rise of environmental awareness but also the reality that if the industry doesn't change it will self-destruct.

Unfortunately what is more likely is that prices go up because of a combination of supply chain logistics being massively impacted by coronavirus and other things, or to just maintain or yield higher profits - with none of that money going to the people making the garments or printing them.

Say prices go up £1 per unit. Uniqlo could suggest 90p of that goes into factory floor wages and 10% goes to shareholders/executive level, by saying something like, "we aim to be sustainable with our pricing", in some PR puff copywriting stuff. In reality 90% of that is a shareholder/executive profit increase but this is justified because workers earned 1p more per hour or something with most going to higher levels in the production chain (such as factory owner, foremen, QA leads etc who's job is to just drive the shop floor harder).

I would class a faded print as a serviceable commodity and one that is inevitable depending on the method of print. The image is the same but with precedence given to the image the primary function of the item as a T-shirt remains. So I'm glad you don't throw them away, but they are still replaced when the item is functionally the same. Lots of people do this and I partly blame manufacturing methods for that.

I'm not sure on the Uniqlo aren't fast fashion. I think they sit somewhere in the middle, however it depends on where you look. I know they are better quality than the proper bottom of the pile stuff, but the model is the same, only the price shifts up or down a bit. The issue with fast fashion isn't entirely the speed per see, or even the cost, but the overproduction model itself.

There's very much a culture in the industry of, if this product doesn't sell, it doesn't matter, we'll just do deep discounts and everyone will be all over it. Feed the poor or whatever. If not, they essentially destroy the stock and cannot make even a fraction of the cost back (and never recover the human cost, even at the full sale price) on the method of destruction, even if it's recycling.

The thing is that's exactly what they expect. It's because of that expectation that they can justify over production to meet the lowest possible production cost. I'm talking under £2-2.50 or under per shirt, and that's only when it gets to here. In overseas territories, we're seeing a real cost to a business that holds assets in those currencies even less than that.

Also if say 20% of your stock volume is in transit, to people who can't be arsed to measure themselves, you have that asset tied up while it is essentially on loan to the customer to return 90% of their order value. This ties up not only cash assets, but human resources too - again, it's overproduction to meet a consumer need that shouldn't exist.

Every shirt, at 3.99, 4.99, £7.50 etc is still making a profit. At scale, that is considerable revenue based on a model of overproduction to get the lowest possible cost per unit and thus still make a profit on the sale price. Because the sale price, is - in essence - the normal price, outside of your "whale" type customers.

If they were not overproducing, there would not be any need for sales! Or they would lower the RRP. But they can't do that to maintain price positioning in the market segment, where they are perceived as a premium brand for what are basically average T-shirts with good (100% automated) printing.

Uniqlo offer nor use any sustainable method of decoration or construction. Organic, re-cycled, or other. They have a new recycling program but they likely sell this recycled cotton product to other brands, or leverage it as a CSR initiative to build the brand itself and appear ethical - known as greenwashing. That will amount to a pitiful amount of their overall business activity. What it amounts to is appeasing the tiny % of customers who need to hear those notes to buy into the brand and feel OK supporting the scale of any of the big name decorated basic/essentialwear brands.

They don't disclose their factory locations, or certifications, and are suspected of violating local labour laws, using cheap production facilities mostly in mainland China.

And honestly I just straight up don't get at times my own clients' loyalty to the brand. I can show them an identical shirt in every way - material, construction, size, shape, and far superior ethical criteria, and they will say the Uniclo one "fits better". One client will even go and buy blank Uniqlo shirts at the full RRP to print, which is strawberry floating nuts (as well as slowing everything down). I do respect that but I find it interesting the power a brand has over its perception as anything but a tawdry mechanism through which to extract value from image on relatively cheap T-shirt.

As an aside, 1% of cotton grown globally for apparel is organic, largely to maintain the low cost of cotton farming needed to offer such low prices, at the cost of soil depletion and forest/other land depletion or habitat destruction. Eventually it will not be possible to grow cotton anymore.

By the way, a soil association certified, or organic content standard T-shirt costs £2-4 at wholesale.

Why aren't Uniclo T-shirts or other large brands using sustainable materials and something barely better than modern slavery standards? 100% profit motive by exploiting the overseas territories that either don't care or can't do anything about it. Until some of the big names start changing the supply chain for the better all of these issues remain the burden of the consumer who is pretty much getting ripped off, because a better made garment lasts longer, and organic cotton is generally of a higher quality because it is fed well and matured at a normal rate (no artificial fertilizers that create inferior fibre grown too quickly).

Got this portable Anker MagSafe battery charger in the Prime Day sale on Amazon for £34.99 (usually £50-60) https://www.amazon.co.uk/Anker-Magnetic ... C89&sr=8-1 Total bargain.

Mafro wrote:Got this portable Anker MagSafe battery charger in the Prime Day sale on Amazon for £34.99 (usually £50-60) https://www.amazon.co.uk/Anker-Magnetic ... C89&sr=8-1 Total bargain.

I’d be tempted by that if you could leave it plugged in so it doubles up as a regular wireless charger.
EDIT: Looks like you can, but not while it’s in the stand position, which would defeat the point for me.

rinks wrote:

Mafro wrote:Got this portable Anker MagSafe battery charger in the Prime Day sale on Amazon for £34.99 (usually £50-60) https://www.amazon.co.uk/Anker-Magnetic ... C89&sr=8-1 Total bargain.

I’d be tempted by that if you could leave it plugged in so it doubles up as a regular wireless charger.
EDIT: Looks like you can, but not while it’s in the stand position, which would defeat the point for me.

I guess you could if you sat it on top of a book or something.