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Gap to close all 81 stores in UK and Ireland

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Re: Gap to close all 81 stores in UK and Ireland

#82

My dream is not paying 100-200 EUR for clothing which cost 1-10 EUR to produce. Don't care about your lifestyle, philosophy, trends, influencers, brand and logo. I want it vulgar - cash for good quality clothes.

Easy to solve when buying them at the local street market (aka bazaar).

Re: Gap to close all 81 stores in UK and Ireland

#83
post #82

My dream is not paying 100-200 EUR for clothing which cost 1-10 EUR to produce. Don't care about your lifestyle, philosophy, trends, influencers, brand and logo. I want it vulgar - cash for good quality clothes.

Easy to solve when buying them at the local street market (aka bazaar).

We don't have one of those in my city. I miss it. :(

Re: Gap to close all 81 stores in UK and Ireland

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most new jeans, jackets, sweaters, chinos, trouses, etc below 50-60 EUR per item look and wear like rags.

There are lots of mid-price clothing retailers across Europe who produce reasonable quality clothes (better than Primark quality). I find it hard to believe these stores sell poor quality chinos, jeans, etc in the 30-50 price range. Having said that, I'm sure everyone has a story of how a cheaply priced item of clothing turned out to be of better quality and durability than a equalivent expensive item. (Aside: In the…

In Germany, there's also the excellent grundstoff.net, which has remarkably cheap basics that are still of high quality and fairly produced. Highly recommended to anyone who is in Europe (though I don't know whether they deliver outside the EU).

Re: Gap to close all 81 stores in UK and Ireland

#86
post #36

Gap's problems for me: 1) Sticking Gap on everything. That kind-of logo/advertisement in huge lettering is great on the way up, but not on the way down. Superdry take note. You could not pay me to wear either. 2) Pricing and price point. It's frankly been bizarre for years. Overpriced when compared to new competitors, such as Uniqlo. Not quite good enough to compete with other stores, such as Levi's or more designer…

I have never liked wearing obviously branded clothing, it always seemed counter-intuitive to me.

People want to show off their brands, and I'm ok with that, but as a nerdy guy who has never had style as a priority (though I'm quite militant about the cut of one's suit being just right), it just isn't me, so that's always ruled out GAP for me in the past.

If a brand splashes their name across the clothes they sell, I'll avoid them, but this limits options a lot of the time.

When it comes to Superdry, I like a lot of their clothing and own a few pieces of it, but I often choose not to wear many pieces because of the branding. I have some really nice jumpers from them which have a little label on the arm, which I find unnecessary. For work I'm more casually dressed than outside of work so I keep the Superdry branded stuff purely for work.

A couple of years ago I found Uniqlo, it was basically perfection, they have a line of chino type trousers I like the fit of, and a T-shirt I like the cut of, as well as some light jumpers, no branding or markings whatsoever, so I bought about ~20 of each in various colours (some of which go unworn to this day because they were a little too wild), and then a year or so later bought another ~10-15 of each.

EDIT: Trying to work on making my writing/comments less bullet pointed and monotonous so restructured a bit.

Re: Gap to close all 81 stores in UK and Ireland

#87
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't have one of those in my city. I miss it. :(

Specially the price negotiation with drama part, I imagine.

It's fun! One time I described how bitterly my three dead grandfathers would cry if they knew I'd overpaid, and the seller responded in kind.

Maybe that's... not the usual type of negotiation, but making them laugh also seems to work. Problem being I got the giggles myself.

Re: Gap to close all 81 stores in UK and Ireland

#88

My dream is not paying 100-200 EUR for clothing which cost 1-10 EUR to produce. Don't care about your lifestyle, philosophy, trends, influencers, brand and logo. I want it vulgar - cash for good quality clothes.

I never quite understood the economics of clothing. Primark is well-known for being cheap, but also for having not exactly great quality, so clearly part of the cost-saving is in the production (e.g. materials, thickness, etc.)

An average wage for a factory worker in Bangladesh seems about $0.33 USD; in Cambodia it's $0.85 USD; other countries are somewhere in between.

I don't know how many clothes a single worker can make, but let's be extremely conservative and say it's two pieces of clothing per 10-hour workday. So that's between $1.65 an $4.25 in wages for a single piece of clothing. I suspect it's actually much much less (but can't find any resources on this at a moment's notice). Even this amount is ... not that much. A 50% or even 100% increase would make a huge difference in people's lives, while having a fairly minor impact on this end.

I grew up fairly poor and for the first 25 years or so I basically never had enough money for anything, so I understand that "a few € more or less, who even notices?-attitude that someone more well-off/middle-class might say is actually not so easy. I know from experience that those "few euro" actually can be quite significant. This is one reason Primark is so popular in the first place.

But still: the difference is stark, and there is little doubt in my mind what is clearly The Right Thing™ to do is here.

I understand that companies want to keep costs down, and that's perfectly reasonably, but this is just ridiculous and extreme. In many cases workers barely have enough money to buy food. And for what? So it's €1 or €2 cheaper? I find it so hard to believe that, as I said in the first line, I must not understand the economics of this somehow. Or maybe I do and people involved in this are just ... ugh...

Re: Gap to close all 81 stores in UK and Ireland

#89
post #37

I'd say things have been heading south for Gap UK shops for the last 10 years and accelerated recently. They have been on a downward quality path for a long time with no apparent strategy. Every time you go back, they have different ranges, so no repeat purchases are even possible. Found something you like and want to buy again? Tough. And the quality got progressively worse. For basics like jeans and t-shirts, I swi…

Gap's quality is higher than H&M, IMHO. Zara is another of Gap's rivals that seems to be expanding in the UK highstreet, although I rarely find anything worth purchasing.

Zara always has queues when I see it, but my wife tells me the quality of everything she's bought from there has been dismally poor, especially given their relatively high prices. Usually the issues she's described are around the quality of the work and not the material, seams falling apart, buttons and accessories falling off etc.

Re: Gap to close all 81 stores in UK and Ireland

#90
post #79
post #36

Gap's problems for me: 1) Sticking Gap on everything. That kind-of logo/advertisement in huge lettering is great on the way up, but not on the way down. Superdry take note. You could not pay me to wear either. 2) Pricing and price point. It's frankly been bizarre for years. Overpriced when compared to new competitors, such as Uniqlo. Not quite good enough to compete with other stores, such as Levi's or more designer…

1) The only thing GAP has going for them IS brand recognition. Otherwise, they’re in some weird in-between of Old Navy and Banana Republic and there are numerous brands out there that have taken their market share (H&M, Uniqlo, etc.).

Not in the UK - Old Navy is unknown here, Banana Republic pretty much the same (you can buy it online). H&M, Uniqlo, and Zara have certainly affected Gap's standing in the market.
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