The UK clothing market is increasingly dominated by the big players - the high street chain stores. Competition between them mean good prices for us - but what does it mean for the people who make our clothes?
The UK clothing market is increasingly dominated by the big players – the high street chain stores.
The names of these large companies will be unfamiliar to most shoppers – as they divide up into smaller shops to target different age groups. For example, Arcadia Group owns Topshop, Topman, Burton Menswear and Dorothy Perkins, amongst others.
And these players - Marks and Spencer, Arcadia Group, Next, Littlewoods, Bhs and Mothercare have the biggest retail sales in the UK, sharing about 45 per cent of the total UK clothes retail market.
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Everyone loves a bargain - even shops. Shops know that if they let the price of clothes rise, then customers will move next door to find a cheaper bargain. Women’s clothing is the most competitive of all and in the last 10 years the price of women's clothing has risen by less than one per cent.
This relentless downward pressure on clothes prices forces clothing retailers to look for cheaper and cheaper places to get clothes produced – which forces manufacturers to scan the globe looking for cheaper labour and higher profit.
It's really hard for us shoppers to know which of our clothes are good or bad. The clothing industry embraces hundreds of thousands of shops, and factories worldwide, and so it’s nearly impossible to assess the working conditions of every single one.
Many companies don’t want to let their customers know where their clothes are made, about how much the factory workers are paid, or about the health and safety standards in the factories. While some companies do have codes of conduct - rules that companies and their suppliers agree to comply with - many don’t tell their customers how these codes are actually put into practice in order for them to make a difference to the factory workers.
Many companies move around from country to country, frequently changing where their clothes are produced, in search of cheaper production prices. This makes it hard to track down the factories they use for inspection – so that checks can be made on how the factory workers are being treated.
There are ways that we as shoppers can check whether companies making our clothes are taking responsibility for the treatment of their workers. Click here to find out how.