Fashion Bits: Beauty-Firm Collusion, Fashion and the Food Crisis, and Robot Shoppers
By Lisha Arino - Jul 15th, 2008 at 5:15 pmSo that last post about not talking more about fashion than I need to? I lied. (I guess I was having a bad day or something.)
Anyhoo, today I’m kicking off a regular feature, Fashion Bits, that will survey the world of–what else?–fashion. I’m not going to tell what to wear or what not to wear, or who wore what best, but when I find something interesting, I’ll let you know. Fashion Bits will run every two weeks.
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Women’s Wear Daily reports today that Germany’s Federal Cartel Office said that it would fine the subsidiaries of several large beauty firms, including LVMH Perfumes and cosmetics, Chanel, Estee Lauder, Shiseido, and YSL Beauté. According to the Cartel Office, representatives from these companies have been meeting up privately since 1995, forming an “elite circle,” that shared information like “sales figures, product pricing and returns, how much they paid for advertising, upcoming product launches and dealings with specific perfumeries.” In short, they worked together to limit competition, keep prices high, and screw over us, the consumers (well, in this case, the Germans). The obvious question: Did they do this elsewhere?
Is fashion contributing to the global food crisis? Alexis Madrigal over at Wired.com is wondering why folks aren’t paying more attention to all the farmland utilized for cotton production instead of food, when so much criticism has been aimed at growing crops for biofuel. According to her post, the United States, China, and India alone plant about 50 million acres of cotton, while only an additional 2.3 million acres will be planted to produce the 15 million gallons of ethanol required by last year’s Energy Bill.
[h/t: Refinery29.com]
Over at The New York Times’ Campaign Stops, Steven Heller, with the help of a few illustrators and designers, comes up with a few lapel pin designers that would allow Obama to show off his patriotism without selling out. As you may recall, Obama caught some flag for not wearing an American flag lapel pin, saying that it has been used as a cheap substitute for patriotism since 9/11, but lately has been seen sporting one.
And I’m going to dedicate this last bit of fashion news to my robot-loving colleague L. Russell Allen. According to Refinery29.com, a shopping robot has been unveiled by Japanese robotics company Tmsuk. Its skills were showcased when an elderly lady shopped with it from home, using a live-video enabled cell phone to control it. As the site points out, the TMSUK-4 remote shopping robot is a “precursor of [a] form of lifestyle-assisting robot” for the elderly and infirmed, so in the long run it could lead to something generally useful for things other than shopping.
Sorry Lisha, but to some degree I feel the need to call possible bullshit on the issue of collusion. The simple fact is that far too often criminal law is stacked against businesses. To massively simplify it:
1) If a business charges less than its competitors it can be charged with predatory pricing.
2) If a business charges more than its competitors they can be charged with price gouging and illegal profiteering.
3) If a business charges the same prices as its competitors they can be charged with collusion.
Businesses in the same industry frequently meet to organize and discuss ideas. I suspect the issue is much more nuanced than assumed.
July 15th, 2008 at 11:00 pm