Well-dressed by the Depression

The advertisements for Joseph A. Bank, the men’s clothier with its ubiquitous advertising, scare me.  Buy one suit, get two suits, two shirts and two ties absolutely free.  I do not know what the first suit costs but two additional suits, two shirts and two ties at no charge?  Hardly seems possible, unless we are heading for an economic depression.My first thought upon seeing the commercials was that the century-old Bank company is on the verge of bankruptcy.  But it isn’t, and, certainly, no one wants to hear of another business going down the drain. With the recently announced retrenchment at Sears-Kmart, it would not be inconceivable.  What is not these days?  My second thought was that perhaps Bank management overbought stock.  Doubtful.  They follow a certain model and they have been around for years and know the ebb and flow of their market.  My third thought was not as kind: Perhaps they know something we do not and that we are headed into a depression.  Prices collapse in a depression.  Maybe they are trying to warn us.  But, no.  We are not headed for that kind of depression, at least not like the Great One – not yet anyway.

The other thing that collapses in an depression of course are wages.  And, of course, we are already in a depression – a depression of collapsed global labor costs that make offerings of unimaginable extras possible.  Unless the articles of clothing offered go only with white belts and white shoes, which I doubt, companies like Bank can offer such deals due to the plunge of prices worldwide made so by cheap labor elsewhere.  This is the Walmart phenomenon, and shoppers in and out of stores like Bank and Walmart seldom think that “Made in China” or “Made in Taiwan” though written in English also means “Lost Another Job”.

I do not know the location of the 23,000 new jobs in manufacturing created last month in the U.S. economy.  It is fair to say that they were not created in the apparel industry and we do not know who filled those jobs but they probably were not taken by immigrants – which is what television advertisements like that produced recently for the Federation for American Immigration Reform would have us believe.  In its nauseatingly misleading ad, FAIR depicts workers losing their jobs leaving office settings.  Indeed, workers in office settings have lost their jobs by the thousands – but many of those were teachers and other public service employees that were forced out by tough budgets, not by tough immigrants.

The FAIR commercial is reminiscent of the ad that great American Jesse Helms ran against Harvey Gantt, the former African American mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina.  In the ad, a white person is rejected for a job because minorities were given preference due to racial quotas.  People in fact were losing their jobs in North Carolina then but not because of racial quotas.  They were losing jobs because those were the years precisely when the textile and clothing industry and the Walmarts of the world were revving up their foreign-based production structures dependent on the cheapest labor available.

Running an ad today that scapegoats immigrants is no different from what Helms did to Gantt two decades ago.  But it might work well enough to scare people nation-wide during an election year.  Ads like that do work, as do the ads that Joseph A. Bank runs, also ad nauseam but at least you know what you are getting.

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