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Physical traffic to retail stores fell sharply this holiday season, according to firms that use sensors and cameras to track in-store shopping. Between Nov. 22 and Jan. 2, store traffic dropped 33% year-over-year, according to Sensormatic Solutions, which uses cameras and software to track visits to thousands of malls and shopping centers. By contrast, in November and December online sales grew 32.2% year-over-year to $188.2 billion,

“In a lot of ways apps seem played out,”

One answer might be to display a new kind of tech brand: physical products that aren’t so much dominated by new technology, but instead informed by the theories and practices that have ruled the tech business.

hey say they have applied an engineering mind-set to creating ingestible items. Traditional coffee is an inconsistent product, they argue — each cup may have significantly more or less caffeine than the last — and it can have undesirable side effects, like jitteriness.

Go Cubes, which the pair developed after a long prototyping process involving many different ingredients, are meant to address these shortcomings. The cubes are more portable than coffee, they offer a precise measure of caffeine, and because they include some ingredients meant to modulate caffeine’s sharpest effects, they produce a more focused high.

Ministry of Supply, an apparel company started by entrepreneurs who were unsatisfied with business clothing that couldn’t take the punishment that we ladle on athletic clothes, uses engineering techniques to create its products.

“My broader theory is that as the world shifts from TV, movies, magazines and newspapers to the Internet, one of the secondary effects of that is that cultural influence shifts from places like New York and L.A. to the Bay Area,”

The satellite towns that ring Dhaka — a maze of shoddy constructions and fetid streams — bring to mind William Blake’s dark Satanic mills, not equitable development. The leather industry has turned Hazaribagh, an area in Old Dhaka, into the fifth-most polluted place in the world, according to the environmental watchdog Blacksmith Institute. Yet industrialization is a proven step toward economic growth. According to the University of Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang, few if any countries have achieved first-world economic status without it.

says Amartya Sen, the economist and Nobel laureate: “In terms of many typical indicators of living standards, Bangladesh not only does better than India, it has a considerable lead over it.”

Even if trade flows begin to balance and there is less job loss in the future, the integration of the U.S. economy with those of its low-wage trading partners will pull down wages for many American workers, and will contribute to the ever rising inequality of incomes in the U.S. economy.

The mounting pressure applied by organized labor can be seen if you compare the votes of California House Democrats in 1993 on the North American Free Trade Agreement with votes on granting approval this year to fast track the TPP.

Nafta was approved in 1993, 234 to 200 by the full House, with Republicans in favor 132-43 and Democrats opposed 156-102. On June 18 of this year, the House passed fast-track legislation, but the partisan differences were much sharper: Republicans voted in favor, 190 to 50; Democrats opposed the legislation 158-28.

In between the votes on Nafta in 1993 and this year’s TPP, there was one major development pushing the union movement to the wall: the decline in manufacturing employment as trade with China accelerated in the 2000s.

The upstairs-downstairs character of the Democratic coalition proved to be the party’s strength in Obama’s two elections, and its continued viability is crucial to Clinton’s prospects next year. Trade, taxes and social spending are subjects that have not yet achieved progressive consensus and retain the potential to fracture the party

Trade always implies job destruction — this is the whole point of trade, namely to destroy jobs in import competing sectors to create them in exporting sectors, thus allowing for reallocation to sectors with comparative advantage, leading to an increased efficiency, the basis for the gains from trade.

Trade was linked to job losses in manufacturing that happened in the 1980s and then again in 2001-2004; it’s not happening now, because those jobs that could be shifted have been.” The bigger problem, Shapiro wrote, “is incomes – a majority of households saw their incomes decline from 2002-2013, even as they aged – i.e., people earned less at 40 than they had at 29.

In addition, one of “the ripple effects of globalization” is an intensification of competition, which, in turn, forces businesses to cut jobs and wages. “When people are feeling squeezed or worse economically, they retreat and see trade as a threat.”

The Democratic opposition to free trade has intensified in large part because of the current prominence of liberal-populist strength and the liberal tilt of individual – as opposed to special interest — donors.

The conflict between a pro-free-trade presidential wing of the Democratic Party and an anti-free-trade congressional wing has the potential to become a permanent fixture of the center-left. The conflict gives expression to both the downscale forces in the party that lean against trade and the pro-trade upscale forces.

from 2000 (the year that Congress granted China permanent normal trade relations status) to 2010, the number of manufacturing jobs fell by 34 percent, from just over 17 million to 11.5 million.

The real question, then, is how long will left and right within the Democratic coalition tolerate an inherently unstable posture on such a core issue as how this country does business abroad, and how it provides a livelihood for its citizens.

Sales at Gap stores open for at least a year, a closely watched figure in the retail industry, have fallen for 13 straight months. The company’s upmarket brand, Banana Republic, has also stumbled, though Gap’s cheaper Old Navy label has done well.

At a vibrant, three-story Uniqlo, Dhushyanthy Tharan of Hoboken, N.J., shopping on her 26th birthday for a long-sleeve button-down shirt, said she found the selection to be of higher quality and more stylish than at the Gap. “I love their materials, the cotton and linen, and their style,” she said. “It’s very young.”

The postwar boom, when measured by the purchasing power of the average paycheck, continued into the early 1970s and then abruptly stoppe

Starting in 2000, two related developments added to worsening conditions for the middle and working classes.

that year marked the end of net upward mobility. Before 2000, the size of both the lower and middle classes had shrunk, while the percentage of households with inflation-adjusted incomes of $100,000 or more grew. Americans were moving up the ladder.

After 2000, the middle class continued to shrink, but so did the percentage of households making $100,000 or more. The only group to grow larger after 2000 was households with incomes of $35,000 or less. Americans were moving down the ladder.

The second adverse trend is that trade with China, which shot up after China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in December 2001, imposed far larger costs on American workers than most economists anticipated

If one had to project the impact of China’s momentous economic reform for the U.S. labor market with nothing to go on other than a standard undergraduate economics textbook, one would predict large movements of workers between U.S. tradable industries (say, from apparel and furniture to pharmaceuticals and jet aircraft), limited reallocation of jobs from tradables to non-tradables, and no net impacts on U.S. aggregate employment. The reality of adjustment to the China shock has been far different. Employment has certainly fallen in U.S. industries most exposed to import competition. But so too has overall employment in local labor markets in which these industries were concentrated. Offsetting employment gains either in export-oriented tradables or in non-tradables have, for the most part, failed to materialize.

High wage workers find it relatively easy to adjust and “do not experience an earnings loss,” argue Autor and his colleagues. Low wage workers, in contrast, “suffer large differential earnings loss, as they obtain lower earnings per year both while working at the initial firm and after relocating to new employers.”

The recipe for populism seems pretty clear: take a surge in manufacturing imports from China and continued automation in the US workplace and add a tepid macroeconomy. The result is a combustible stew sure to sour the stomach of party leaders nationwide.

The stew, to continue Hanson’s metaphor, began to boil over with the cataclysmic financial collapse in September 2008, which many people left and right felt was caused by reckless financial engineering on Wall Street. The collapse and the destruction it left in its wake was, without question, the most important economic and political event in recent years.

“It was the financial crisis, what it revealed about government-Wall Street links, and the fumbling of the response to it that put the nail in the coffin of trust in government,

, TARP insulated the very institutions and executives that caused the collapse and the disastrous recession that followed.

The widespread sense that all the elites in Washington and New York conspired to bail out the miscreants who caused the disaster and then gave them bonuses, while the rest of us lost our houses or saw their value, the biggest and often only asset of Americans, plummet, lost our jobs or saw them frozen and stagnant, and then saw gaping inequality grow even more, is just palpable.

On Jan. 10, 2010, the Supreme Court granted those in upper income brackets additional privileges in its Citizens United decision (buttressed by subsequent lower court rulings) that allowed wealthy individuals, corporations and unions to make unlimited political contributions. By opening the door to the creation of SuperPACs and giving Wall Street and other major financial sectors new ways to buy political outcomes, the courts gave the impression, to say the least, that they favored establishment interests over those of the less well off.

A Bloomberg poll last September found that 78 percent of voters would like to see Citizens United overturned, and this view held across a range of partisan loyalties: Republicans at 80 percent; Democrats at 83; and independents at 71.

. Obamacare, a program many in the white middle and working classes perceived as reducing their own medical care in order to provide health coverage to the disproportionately minority poor.

By the midterm elections of 2010, voter dissatisfaction among whites found expression in the Tea Party movement, which produced the sweeping defeat of Democrats in competitive congressional districts as well as of moderate and center-right Republicans in primary contests.Voter anger was directed at two targets — the “undeserving rich” and the “undeserving poor.”

To many of those who cast their ballots in anger in 2010 and 2014, however, it appeared that their votes had not changed anything. Obamacare stayed in place, Wall Street and corporate America grew richer, while the average worker was stuck going nowhere.

Already disillusioned with the Democratic Party, these white voters became convinced that the mainstream of the Republican Party had failed them, not only on economic issues, but on cultural matters as well.

A September 2015 Ispos survey asked voters if they agreed or disagreed with the statement “More and more, I don’t identify with what America has become.” 72 percent of surveyed Republicans concurred, compared to 58 percent of independents and 45 percent of Democrats. Two thirds of Republicans, 62 percent, agreed with the statement “These days I feel like a stranger in my own country,” compared to 53 percent of independents and 37 percent of Democrats. Here is one place where Trump’s scathing dismissal of political correctness found fertile ground.

If he prevails, a constituency that could force politicians to confront the problems of the working and middle class will waste its energies on a candidate incompetent to improve the lives of the credulous men and women lining up to support him.

the consequences of disillusionment with old guard Republicans:The intersection of inequality driven by real wage/income stagnation and the fact that the folks perceived to have blown the damn economy up not only recovered first, but got government assistance in the form of bailouts to do so. If you’re in the anxious middle and that doesn’t deeply piss you off, you’re an unusually forgiving person.

This election has demonstrated that there is no Republican Party organization, per se. The Republican Party exists as an array of allied groups, incumbent office holders, media organizations, and funding vehicles (e.g., SuperPACs, 501(c)(4)s, and the like). When people ask why the “establishment” or “the party” has not done anything to stop Trump, it is not exactly clear who they mean.

The tragedy of the 2016 campaign is that Trump has mobilized a constituency with legitimate grievances on a fool’s errand.If he is shoved out of the field somehow, his supporters will remain bitter and enraged, convinced that a self-serving and malign elite defeated their leader.

In these circumstances, Bernstein wrote, the logic supporting the traditional Republican Party fell apart:The core theme of Republican establishment lore has been to demonize not unregulated finance or trade or inequality, but ‘the other’ – e.g., the immigrant or minority taking your job and claiming unneeded government support. And yet, none of their trickle down, deregulatory agenda helped ameliorate the problem at all. So they lost control.

Missing in your narrative were 2 other factors that contributed to American anger and the turn to Mr. Trump. Those two factors are: the group of very wealthy American's who were convened by the Koch brothers to pool their resources to destroy President Obama and the Congressional Democrats and moderate Republicans, e.g. Senator Lugar.

were suffering from a major contraction and the drying up of credit & jobs and the President unwisely & wrongly appointed the Simpson-Bowles commission to rein in the debt. Remember Harvard's Rogoff & Reinhart who came up with that Debt to GDP ratio? And the rally of our elites & Pete Peterson et al that Deficits were the problem, when the truth, based on history, was just the opposite.

The 2nd factor which can also be attributed to the White House as well as Democrats in the Congress who joined Republicans in misdiagnosing the problem as deficits and debt.

Forever 21, like its fast-fashion compatriots Zara and H&M, succeeded because it gave young people the thrill of personal choice, more so than any other business model in the world. It crippled some of those other models in the process.

Generation Z consumers—kids currently in grade school and college—just see a bunch of cheap stuff that everyone already knows about.

“A big difference with Generation Z is that they’re not all trying to look the same,” she says.

Gen Z “likes to do research, they have a limited budget, they spend online because they can get better deals.”

“We have a new generation that is more sophisticated in the sense that they are more interested in what they’re consuming,” she says. “They have strong convictions about what they should be wearing and the ethical and authenticity aspects of it, and transparency in terms of manufacturing—especially the ones that are really concerned about climate change.”

She pointed to Greta Thunberg and the success of her recent student climate protests as an indicator of what Generation Z is willing to do in order to stand up for their beliefs.

For some young consumers, those beliefs mean eschewing fast fashion—a business shot through with ethical, environmental, and human-rights problems—in favor of buying clothes secondhand

Teens have been gifted thrifters for generations, but start-ups like Depop have turned that facility into something that can be done on a far larger scale. These start-ups allow young people to buy used clothing from each other and scour the internet for weird finds from the backs of strangers’ closets

That growth, along with all the other ways that the internet lets teens explore identities and aesthetics for themselves and find things they like, has started to change how fashion trends form in and of themselves. “It’s now much more common to see trends growing from the bottom up, and then the press catches on to them, and then they become mass-marketed,

It might be social media, not online shopping itself, that presents the biggest problem for Forever 21 as it moves forward. Young Americans have the most direct window into the lives of others that they’ve ever had, which means they’re acutely aware of how people shop, and any particular marketer’s ability to influence their decisions is limited by the fragmented, decentralized way that adolescents learn about the world

Mike Barry, director of sustainable business at Marks & Spencer, said: “The signals are [fashion is] on the same trajectory as plastics and forests and alternatives to meat. These were all underlying concerns that got through to the mainstream consumer.

The government-backed sustainable clothing action plan, whose signatories include Next, M&S, Ted Baker, Primark and Asos, has committed nine major retailers to reducing waste being sent to landfill, water use and carbon footprint by 15% by 2020.

“We have only got 12 years to tackle damaging climate change,” she says. “We as consumers have to ask questions of brands. Brands have to make it part of what they do. These are massive companies run by some of the world’s richest men. Someone is doing OK out of it.”

Creagh adds that cheap fashion comes with a social as well as an environmental cost – with low-paid workers overseas unable to provide for their families. “We are not saying to people on a low income you can’t buy cheap clothes. We are saying it is time that the cost should reflect the true cost of the minimum wage and decent working conditions and growing stuff without pesticides. It needs to be sustainable from top to bottom and we don’t think the true cost is a £5 dress. That price is not being paid by us, it is being paid by someone else and the environment.”

Environmental campaigners say people who want to be more sustainable should choose quality clothes and make them last as long as possible by learning to repair or rework them. Buying secondhand or vintage clothing, considering renting outfits rather than buying, and washing garments less often at lower temperatures in a full machine can all help.

Sumner says: “The more you process and play with them the worse they are and the quality reduces. “Recycled fibres through traditional routes are poor quality.”

"America is at a tipping point, finely balanced between truth and lies, hope and hate, civility and nastiness. Many vital aspects of American public life are in play – the Supreme Court, abortion rights, climate policy, wealth inequality, Big Tech and much more. The stakes could hardly be higher. As that choice nears, the Guardian, as it has done for 200 years, and with your continued support, will continue to argue for the values we hold dear – facts, science, diversity, equality and fairness." – US editor, John Mulholland

"Companies that exploit their workers have no place doing business in the United States," said Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas in a statement. "Products made from forced labor not only exploit workers, but hurt American businesses and expose consumers to unethical purchases."

Earlier this week, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai also called attention to the issue of forced labor on fishing vessels, submitting a proposal to the World Trade Organization to curb subsidies to fishing activities that involve the use of forced labor and requiring that member countries recognize the problem.

The Trump administration, during its last week in office, implemented a ban on the import of cotton and tomato products from China's Xinjiang region. The sweeping prohibition followed allegations that products were being produced by Uighur Muslims working under involuntary conditions and forced labor.

In September, in a similar effort, the U.S. prohibited the import of certain Chinese-made hair products, apparel and computer parts over concerns of forced labor — again in the Xinjiang region.

"DHS will continue to aggressively investigate the use of forced labor by distant water fishing vessels, and by a wide range of other industries," said Secretary Mayorkas in a news briefing. "Producers and U.S. importers alike should understand that there will be consequences for entities that attempt to exploit workers to sell goods in the United States." Facebook Twitter Flipboard Email

An armed standoff ensued in the House chamber, with police officers drawing their weapons. A pro-Trump protester casually monkeyed around at the dais of the Senate.

It began around 1 p.m., when a mass of Trump supporters, some in camouflage and armed with baseball bats or knives, left the National Mall and, encouraged by President Trump, ascended on the Capitol complex.

“I don’t trust any of these people,” said Eric Martin, 49, a woodworker from Charleston, S.C., as he marveled at the opulence of the Capitol and helped a friend wash pepper spray from his eyes. “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

The Capitol Police fatally shot a woman inside the building, according to Chief Robert J. Contee of the Metropolitan Police Department, and multiple officers were injured.

“This is what the president has caused today, this insurrection,” Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, said as he and other senators were hustled off to a secure location.

The few police officers standing on the steps of the Capitol were overwhelmed. Their flash bang grenades only invigorated the protesters. Around 2:30, an entrance near the west side of the Capitol descended into chaos as a wave of Trump supporters wearing Make America Great Again apparel pressed past police barricades.

For about an hour, the Trump loyalists went in and out of at least one entrance of the Capitol with little disruption from the police.

Soon, a nervous energy pulsed through the room. The police began to close the gallery doors, which had remained open to allow for better ventilation as lawmakers streamed in. Congressional leaders were quickly ushered out, as staff aides urged lawmakers in the gallery and on the floor to remain calm.

In the House, just after 2:30 p.m., a police officer stepped on the dais and informed lawmakers that they might need to duck under their chairs.

Frantic shouting filled the room as lawmakers struggled to unfold the plastic bags that they were instructed to prepare to put over their heads in case of tear gas.

In a surreal scene of chaos and glee, hundreds of Trump loyalists roamed the halls, taking photos and breaking into offices. No police officers were in view.

“We’re claiming the House, and the Senate is ours,” a sweaty man in a checked shirt shouted, stabbing his finger in the air.

“You guys just need to go outside,” he said to a man in a green backpack. Asked why the police were not forcing the mob out, the officer said, “We just got to let them do their thing for now.”

One protester came up to him and shouted in his face, “Traitor!” When another man approached to apologize to the officer, the officer replied, “You’re fine.”

Around 3:30 p.m., about 25 police officers had entered the Crypt and started asking people to move back. A few minutes later, dozens more, wearing riot gear and some in gas masks, ejected the roughly 150 protesters in the Crypt.

Protesters repeatedly exited the building bearing trophies that they had torn off walls. A few carried “Area Closed” signs that they had snatched and then stormed past.

By 7 p.m., the presence of police officers and federal agents had drastically increased along the National Mall. Officers pushed back against aggressive protesters as they prepared for the possibility of more unrest overnight.

“We want to go back,” Mr. Crow said. “And finish the business of the people to show that we are a democracy, and that the government is stronger than any mob.”

The report argues that the pandemic exposed the huge power imbalance at the heart of the fashion industry, which demands that suppliers in some of the poorest countries in the world bear all the upfront production costs while buyers pay nothing until weeks or months after factories ship the goods.

Despite leaving suppliers and workers facing ruin, some retailers have paid out millions in dividends to shareholders. In March, Kohl’s, one of the US’s largest clothing retailers, paid out $109m in dividends just weeks after cancelling large orders from factories in Bangladesh, Korea and elsewhere

In an open letter published in April, the Garment Manufacturers Association in Cambodia appealed to buyers to honour their contracts to protect the 750,000 workers who rely on the Cambodian garment industry.

“All parties in the global apparel supply chain are feeling the extreme burden caused by Covid-19,” the letter said. “However, manufacturers [factories] operate on razor-thin margins and have much less ability to shoulder such a burden as compared to our customers [buyers]. The consequential burden faced by our workers who still need to put food on the table is enormous and extreme.”

In Bangladesh, more than a million garment workers have been fired or furloughed as a result of cancelled orders and buyers’ refusal to pay, according to the CGWR. Despite a government package of more than $500m to factories to help mitigate job losses, Bangladeshi workers have reported not being paid for two months or more.

“While their economic position at the top of supply chains gives them the power to renege on what they owe suppliers during a crisis, they have a moral obligation to protect the most vulnerable … and that begins with protecting the wellbeing of the workers at the bottom of supply chains.”

Topshop owner Arcadia Group, Walmart, Urban Outfitters and Mothercare are listed among those which have made no commitment to pay in full for orders completed and in production.

n contrast, said WRC’s Nova, a substantial number of big brands and retailers are now fulfilling their financial obligations to suppliers. H&M and Zara made a commitment to pay after Anner first revealed the scale of the cancellations in a CGWR/WRC report published at the end of March. Gap is among others that have since followed suit.