[anymouse123456]

I don't doubt that some luxury organizations destroy unsold inventory rather than allow it to diminish the status of their brand. My claim is that if they could have sold that inventory at a profit, they would have.

It's theirs to do with as they please. They paid for it to be made.

If you don't like how they run their business, don't buy the overpriced garbage they sell.

People seem to be so concerned about externalities like CO2 emissions, but it's difficult to believe this problem represents a scale even remotely meaningful in that area. It feels like the plastic straw bullshit that took over the US for a few years. A useless, symbolic gesture that causes far more harm than good.

As a side note, it's a weird feeling to jump to the defense of an industry I generally despise, but the regulation just seems so ludicrous.

[apexalpha]

>It's theirs to do with as they please. They paid for it to be made.

This is not how that works. You have to pay for things within a legal framework setup by the government. If the legal frameworks changes then you have to deal with that.

[anymouse123456]

Indeed. The government represents a legal framework for us all to operate in together. Sure.

If I pay for something to be made, that something belongs to me. It becomes private property and (at least in the US) I'm free to destroy a thing I own.

If you want to talk about options for protecting the environment, that seems great. There are ways to destroy textiles without fouling rivers or the air.

The OP article raises the spectre of "CO2 emissions" and "pollution" but doesn't provide any meaningful data (units or scale) related to these concerns.

My claim is that there is no way this activity represents any reasonable scale of impact relative to those separate concerns and that we already have lots of regulation related to keeping our water and air clear.

We can discuss ideas about how to do even better on those fronts, but this does not seem like a great way to have a large impact, if the environment is the actual concern.

How about all the laborers who were able to feed their families making these products that were destroyed? What happens to them when the company decides next year to be more conservative and make less stuff?

I'm not advocating for waste, I'm just pointing out that legislation like this often (almost always) comes along with unintended consequences that wind up causing more harm than good.

[ragall]

> My claim is that if they could have sold that inventory at a profit, they would have.

That's utterly incorrect. They don't just want profits - that would be easy to obtain by sending the merchandise to an outlet - they want high profits in a way that maintains high profits in the future too. Any discount "cheapens" the brand by giving customers the expectation of low(er) prices in the future.

> It's theirs to do with as they please.

Only within the bounds of the law.

[anymouse123456]

Agreed. A good business will take both short and long term profit into consideration when making a decision. They will strive to maximize profit (within reason) in whatever they do.

I don’t presume to know anything about the fashion industry and generally find it uninteresting.

My point is that I assume the people running those businesses know what they’re doing. Many of them have been around for many decades.

I’m admittedly surprised to find so many people here with so much confidence in their own ability to effectively constrain an entire industry they obviously also know nothing about.