The true price of those blue jeans
Those jeans of yours were made in Bangladesh and traveled a long way before being marked up by 300% or more.
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- Mon, Jun 17, 2013 6:45 PM ET
Call it the calculations of the traveling pants. Those jeans you're wearing made a long journey from where they were manufactured in Bangladesh before they made it into the shop you bought them in. And the price you're paying? Let's just say it's a pretty hefty mark-up.
Reuters delved into the manufacturing process and came up with some alarming numbers.
When a factory in Bangladesh receives an order for a pair of jeans, materials and labor together cost about US $8.42. Once the jeans are made, packaged, trucked to the port of Chittagong from Dhaka, 153 miles away, and shipped to the USA (a trip that takes about 30 days), the cost has jumped to about $12.29. That includes U.S. Import dues and the cost of repackaging and trucking to retail stores throughout the U.S.
What do you pay? An average of $38.87, according to Reuters. That's more than 400% over the initial cost of manufacturing, or about two weeks wages for the workers who made them.
Watch the video for more details.
Reuters delved into the manufacturing process and came up with some alarming numbers.
When a factory in Bangladesh receives an order for a pair of jeans, materials and labor together cost about US $8.42. Once the jeans are made, packaged, trucked to the port of Chittagong from Dhaka, 153 miles away, and shipped to the USA (a trip that takes about 30 days), the cost has jumped to about $12.29. That includes U.S. Import dues and the cost of repackaging and trucking to retail stores throughout the U.S.
What do you pay? An average of $38.87, according to Reuters. That's more than 400% over the initial cost of manufacturing, or about two weeks wages for the workers who made them.
Watch the video for more details.
http://finances.msn.com/
Luckily with today's heat, I'll be wearing a dress