My family is a Hanes underwear family, mainly because my Mom is leading the boycott against Fruit of the Loom. She and Dad were union members during their years at Brown and Williamson, so my family has always been supportive of other unions. Out of solidarity, we've not shopped at stores where striking union employees were picketing, and recently, we've not bought products from companies who close their U.S. factories and relocate to some third world country where they can hire cheap labor. Fruit of the Loom did just this. They closed their Bowling Green, KY factory and opened a sweat shop, I mean, factory, in Mexico. A few thousand people lost their jobs. So that's why my family doesn't buy Fruit of the Loom products. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that Hanes has foreign factories, too, but my Mother hasn't found about it yet. This concludes our lesson on the evils of NAFTA.
My family has been buying Hanes and Hanes Her Way products for over ten years. No matter what time fo the year you need to buy a new pack of underwear, at least one of the major discount stores will have them on sale any given week of the year. Over a year ago, Hanes went tagless and had Jackie Chan and Michael Jordan appear in the commercials for their tagless t-shirts and underwear. Even though Hanes makes high quality products that they sell at reasonable prices, I have one bone to pick with them -- they discriminate against the women. The men's products were all tagless, but the women's still had the tags in them. It's not like they annoyed me so much that cut out the tags each time I bought a Hanes t-shirt at a concert or got a new pack of Hanes Her Way underwear, but it was the point -- if the men's products were tagless, then by Ned the women's should be tagless, too.
1 comment:
Like your family, I too, migrated to Hanes after the BG closing required many jobless workers to travel further to Nashville or Louisville for jobs. I love the Hane's mens Signature Collection briefs but they're so doggone hard to find unless you pay for a membership to Sam's Club. I generally buy mine new from eBay. I preferred having the tags for the sake of accurately judging the age of old undergarments. Men generally wear tee shirts and underwear way past the normal threshold of elasticity and bleach-erased, worn out tags are usually indicative that undergarments need to be replaced. So, in essence, I prefer to have the tags as an indicator of when the garment should be tossed into the rags bucket to wash the car or clean windows. Perhaps, I should venture into the tagless era and see if I might change my mind. And while we're on the issue of NAFTA, I read on the Yahoo Financial quiz that every dollar that the US spends on outsourcing work to a foreign country only returns $1.13 to the US corporation. I suppose $.13 is significant considering the untold millions that corporations have spent to help create the current highest ever trade deficit. Sometimes I feel we have rushed into globalization and have forgotten our own people.
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