Americans buy a lot of clothes. On average, each person purchased 64 garments in 2014, in fact.
However, most of us are blissfully unaware of the sometimes terrible things that happen so you can have that cotton button-down on your back. But once you know that people's lives are ruined just so we can all buy some cheap jeans, you can't really unknow it.
As usual, John Oliver used his top story on Last Week Tonight to expose the seedy underbelly of a topic. This week it was buying clothing, which Oliver said has become easier and cheaper than ever before. However, this hasn't come without a huge cost to other people.
Yeah, if you like shopping for clothing in the United States and love to express your personality to the world by looking great, this segment will probably suck the fun right out of all of that for you. But we will all probably be better for knowing it.
While it's all good and well to laugh at how ridiculously enthusiastic morning news show hosts get when they talk about the insanely cheap prices for items like trendy denim culottes, Oliver used the top story on Last Week Tonight to explain why retailers can sell that piece of clothing for such a low price. The vast majority of clothing sold in the U.S. is made overseas these days, to the tune of 98 percent.
And with that comes a big problem, the fact that many of the factories for the country's major clothing retailers still use underage laborers or have horrible working conditions, which can sometimes be deadly. What's even worse, this is unfortunately something we've seen occur time and time again.
So in an attempt to make these retailers understand why they should care, Oliver hosted a fashion show featuring the latest spring styles as well as the lunches he planned on sending to the CEOs of H&M, Walmart, Gap, Joe Fresh and The Children's Place on Monday. But these weren't just any meals of sushi, flautas and rotisserie chicken. They were made in a way analogous to how these retailers have manufactured clothing in developing countries in the past. That means these CEOs are probably not going to want to eat any of this.
Check out the full Last Week Tonight segment below, and it's sure to give you some food for thought.
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