Wealth Management

A lot of talk these days about the over-production of textiles, an industry that has grown by 4% each year since the establishment of the first cotton mills. Second-hand clothing sales have likely surpassed that number, and are growing steadily. Why? Because second-hand clothing is cheaper (though not as cheap as it used to be); it is also ethical (a smaller carbon footprint).

Given the growth of this second-hand clothing market, how best to encourage it, capitalize on it? I'm no Morton Friedman, nor am I a Jonathan Swift, for that matter, but I see enormous entrepreneurial potential in hiring people to wear new clothes and have those clothes bundled for re-sale.

It might work like this. Workers are paid minimum wage to wear new clothes for an hour at a time, but in a controlled environment to keep them from getting soiled. An ideal re-purposed production site could be the many public school that are soon to be closed by municipal governments, now that it is cheaper to keep children at home for their schooling.

The canny entrepreneur will take this further by hiring slender workers to wear not one outfit of clothes at a time, but up to four complete outfits (S, M, L, XL), thereby quadrupling production. For employers concerned about discriminating against plus-sized workers, you merely tell the courts that they are, by virtue of their "formal" capacities, unqualified.