The £4 trousers

I needed a new pair of trousers (shorts, actually) at short notice. My wife bought me a pair at Tesco's (sort of like Wal-Mart, if you're not from the UK). Looked very nice, cost £4. At that price, I joked, its cheaper to throw them away rather than wash them.

And indeed it might be best. After 1 (2?) washes, the seams are coming apart. So I get to spend far more than £4's worth of my time sewing them up again...

Is this the price of globalisation? Or just one bad pair of trousers?

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You get what you pay for. Chinese can manufacture much better clothing, but it will not cost four quid.

[Ah well, I *thought* the idea was I paid £4 and got, through globalisation, cheap good trous. It seems I get cheap cr*p trous, which wasn't a good bargain - W]

By Roman Werpachowski (not verified) on 07 May 2006 #permalink

Practically every not tailor-made piece of clothing you can buy is made in China or Turkey -- perhaps also Ukraine, but I'd doubt it. So you profit from globalisation anyway. It's just that quality costs more than crap, and globalisation won't change it ;-)

By Roman Werpachowski (not verified) on 07 May 2006 #permalink

You should buy two and throw them both away after wearing one of them once. This will increase consumption and make us all wealthier.

Bad Trousers?

Bad Globalisation more like.

Mind you would u bother to go to Mark & Sparks and claim a refund if a pair of Israeli made pants split after 3 washes?

And how good is your stitching (sewing)? A skill every "survivalist must have in Antartica or even Arabica.