Walking down 68th Street yesterday between Lexington and Third Avenues – the spot where, historians think, Nathan Hale was hanged in September of 1776– I felt the world change. A sidewalk vendor was selling pretty decent neckties for $5 each.
Neckties are one of my subjects. Since I was thirteen years old, I’ve spent more time wearing neckties than not. From the eighth grade on we had to wear them everywhere but on the athletic field – and in those days I spent as little time as possible on the athletic field. And in most of the jobs I’ve had since, neckties were de rigueur. I kept reading about the new business casual and the trend away from ties – but never actually encountered it in the workplace.
I’m also a messy eater, especially when soup and/or pasta is involved. I put that down to problems with depth perception that come from weak eyesight and strong glasses prescriptions. I spill soup on myself for the same reason that I tend to dent fenders on those rare occasions when I find myself behind the wheel of a car. That’s my theory and I’m sticking to it; the family’s view seems to be that I’m just a slob – and a lousy driver.
In any case, the combination means I’ve bought a lot of neckties over the years and learned something about how to price them. It’s an important field of study for a man, even one less spill-prone than I am. Barring fancy watches and cufflinks, inch for inch neckties are typically the most expensive thing men wear; they are also, notoriously, the easiest to ruin and the hardest to clean.
The most important lesson I’ve learned from a long lifetime in the tie market: you should never buy ties in the conventional way. Men’s stores, department stores, tie kiosks in airports: they rip you off big. $30 is cheap in a lot of stores; $60 ties aren’t hard to find, and they just go up from there. This is a lot of money for a stain-sucking soup magnet.
Over the years I’ve learned about tie bargains. The best place on earth to buy men’s ties is Bangkok – although I suspect Ho Chi Minh City may be nipping at its heels. In Bangkok’s night markets, you can find tie vendors with a few hundred ties on display. When you find a vendor with a good selection, haggle down to the best price you can get for one tie – then see if you get a further discount for two. Then see what you can get if you offer to take ten. I’ve been able to get them down to $1 a tie once or twice: a personal best.
Venice, not generally known as the home of the bargain, is another good place for men’s ties. Pretty consistently I’ve found that you can find reasonable, non-embarrassing ties for 8 euros and less. Walk from St. Mark’s to the Rialto and you will see what I mean.
The Beijing Pearl Market also has its attractions; the haggling there is pretty ferocious – I’d rather haggle in Bangkok where things are more laid back. But you can come away with significantly better ties there than you find in the Thai night markets for between five and ten dollars. (With practice and local knowledge, you could do better, I think. Beijing is a tough, world-class city and the vendors are skilled.)
Otherwise, it’s a cold and cruel world. In most places cheapish ties can be found, but like the polyester kangaroo ties that infest Australian souvenir stands, you get what you pay for. And heaven help you if you need to buy ties in London, Paris and Berlin.
This is not, from the consumer’s point of view, a perfect world. It’s not only that the good tie markets are hard to get to; the choices are not always ideal. The elephant motif is big in Thailand; in America an elephant tie is a political statement. Venetian ties run to the topical, too: gondolas and winged lions a la San Marco are the most popular themes. I happen to like them, but you can’t wear a gondola tie every day.
Until yesterday, I’d thought of New York as one of the world’s low yielding tie markets. You can find cheap ties here and in the old days they were common down on the Lower East Side, but they looked even cheaper than they were and polyester was the fabric of choice.
Now that’s all changed, thanks to the vendor on 68th. I didn’t actually buy any ties – I’ve still got some virgin ties in the closet from my last trip to Beijing – but a casual glance showed three or four that could, for example, be worn on a cable news show. The quality is comparable to what you would find at the Pearl Market and the initial price, no haggle needed, is less.
So: New York is on the verge of becoming a world-class tie source. Big deal, you say.
Well, it isn’t a big deal in itself, but it points to a few trends that matter.
First, it’s a sign that the crisis of our legacy institutions and organizations still has a long way to run. Brooks Brothers, Bloomingdales, Macy’s: traditional retailers have a lot of overhead to support. A lot of bricks and mortar and a lot of middle management stands behind those big brands. Street vendors won’t bring the big stores to their knees, but the gap between manufacturer’s costs and retail prices will continue to narrow. There are more and more ways to disintermediate, to cut out the middleman. Remember how many travel agents there used to be before Orbitz and Priceline? What are they all doing now?
That’s an opportunity, and a problem. Obviously, ties are cheaper and we have more choices and convenience when we book flights. On the other hand, those high overhead legacy operations are where a lot of consumers make their livings.
One message of the cheap ties in New York is that there are more waves of layoffs and downsizings to come, and not just in clothes stores. Blue collar America went through mass downsizing in the 1970’s and 1980’s as automation and off-shore competition gutted the traditional manufacturing system in the US.
Now it’s the turn of the white-collar workforce. Law firms are already sending back office work overseas; the recession has accelerated the cost squeeze on the legal industry. Their corporate clients are telling them that change has to come. Businesses are continuing to look for ways to cut headcount; better software increasingly will mean that fewer professionals are needed to carry on basic business. The ranks of journalists have already been scythed by the newspaper equivalent of the five dollar tie: free access to news, opinion and other information on the web. The rationalization of costs and the downsizing of both profit and non-profit organizations is picking up speed. That’s part of what those ties were telling me.
The other half of the message is even scarier. I didn’t look at the labels (who’d believe the label on a five dollar tie?) so I don’t know where the ties were made. They looked more Chinese than Vietnamese or Thai at a casual glance, but that’s just a guess. However they almost certainly come from East or Southeast Asia, and the message of the five dollar tie to Asia is grimmer even than their message to Macy’s.
Here’s what I think this means. In the last forty years the dramatic rise in global manufacturing capacity has created a huge glut. There are more people who want to make cars than people who can buy them at the traditional price. The result is a tight market for manufactured goods of all kinds, starting maybe with my five dollar tie, but running all the way up to Airbus and Boeing.
In the short term, that’s bad news for individual producers. Profit margins have shrunk for a lot of factories. Factories actually depend on the sixty dollar standard tie and its equivalent as much as retailers. If retailers are collapsing and/or slashing their prices, they are going to cut the prices they pay their suppliers. And if there are too many suppliers chasing retail orders, that price pressure turns brutal.
But there’s more. Discounting the cyclical effects of economic upturns, over the long run, manufacturing margins will stay under pressure. That means both economic and political trouble for countries like China. Economically, it’s hard to see how China can keep up its blistering growth rates into the future if its factories stop being so profitable. Politically, think about all those industrial workers who, instead of raises, might face falling wages.
It’s thoughts like this that keep China’s rulers up late at night, and well they should.
So: are five dollar neckties a Good Thing – or should we pass laws to keep those dratted vendors off the streets and to promote ‘fair’ competition (i.e. price fixing cartels) among retailers and manufacturers?
Myself, I’m firmly in the five dollar tie camp. I’d rather deal with the disruptions and disadvantages of a world that was becoming more productive, more capable of providing better goods at lower prices, than deal with the problems of standing still. There are too many billions of people out there still living on less than the price of a cheap tie for me to think it’s humane or moral for the world to stand pat.
But that doesn’t mean that change will be easy. Those five dollar ties are, in their way, as dangerous and revolutionary as was Nathan Hale, who died 233 years ago last month at 68th Street and Third Avenue, back when this part of Manhattan was still farmlands and woods.