I got an email from Vietnam yesterday…
I know it is time to stop being amazed at how a manufacturing company in Vietnam finds my e-mail address at HEMPY’S and finds the right person to send the solicitation to. I get these on a weekly basis, but they still surprise me.
“I am glad you are a purveyor of fine headwear” this particular e-mail started out in the usual not quite natural English intro. Below there was pictures of baseball hats, and trucker hats, flat brims and curved brim, some were polyester, some were cotton etc. etc. From the small catalogue shots they looked like decently made hats. I was about to close the page and move on with my day when I noticed the price listing down the side of the page. I did a double take… is that in US $$$? — wait let me get my glasses, that can’t say $.81. Yes it did. I could buy these polyester/cotton baseball hats for 81 CENTS!
All I could think of at that moment was, oh those poor people, whoever it is endlessly turning out these hats they were offering for me to buy. How much are they being paid? What are the working conditions? How can they even make the fabric for that much? What was the environmental cost and more importantly the HUMAN cost of being able to deliver goods, no matter what the fabric at $.81 in 2015? As a manufacturer myself, I am well aware of all of the costs of buying, and repairing machinery and paying utilities and buying good fabric and THEN paying a craftsman to build a beautiful hat. I honestly could not fathom how this could possibly all be done for something less than 81 cents anywhere on this planet. As I let that number sink in.. I kept looking at the page – the hats looked fine and yet there was that $.81 USD.
Now, the fact that the planet is currently out of balance in many ways is not new news to any of us. But sometimes it takes a blatant visual aid in our own field of experience to really reveal to ourselves and really internalize to our bones a certain truth. What I was looking at (see below) is completely immoral and unconscionable. It is NOT sustainable and so completely out of balance on so many levels.
See THE TRUE COST https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaGp5_Sfbss for an excellent treatment on this whole issue.