Another Problem to be Fixed?

It's an interesting statistic, and I kinda wonder any German would care about this.  Officially, on the books....around 2.3 billion pieces of clothing (from t-shirts, to bras, and just about everything in-between).....is put on the racks to be sold in Germany each year.  You can do the math....82-million residents somewhere in the mix.

So here's the thing....around 80 to 90 percent of this gets sold.  This leaves the German politician, the German bureaucrat, and the environmentalist all in a huff.  The rest of this is becoming harder and harder to sell or dispose of. 

Yes, as you can imagine....the Environmental Minister (Schulze, SPD Party) wants a law to fix this.

Why so many items left over?  I would offer three observations on this:

1.  First, clothing designers aren't exactly picking trendy fashion items or colors.  I can walk into the men's department of a major German shop, and stand there laughing over the color trends.  It's just not something that I'd go and spend twenty Euro upon.

2.  Cheap clothing has a marginal curiosity for people.  There's a particular German shop known for cheap t-shirts....nothing more than three or four Euro.  It's the type of stuff that will bleed colors on the first wash, and have holes appearing one single summer.  Even kids will put their hand up and say no....if offered this type of t-shirt.

3.  Quality has slipped an awful lot on the German clothing market in the past twenty years.  Virtually everything is made either in China, or Vietnam.  Around five years ago, I bought a forty Euro jacket, and after three months....various parts of it were falling apart. 

I can understand the feeling of the shops and negativity over having pallets of stuff in the warehouse to dispose of.  But here's the thing.....do you really want the government to start making up laws to prevent this?  This almost sounds like the old GDR (East German) mentality where everything was going to be micromanaged and you could never find your size for a pair of pants.

The odds of another clothing tax occurring out of this discussion?  One can only hope this isn't the end-all solution to this.