I am sure we all had one of these conversations before even with yourself asking how can some of the things be so cheap at times.
For example, a pair of shoes that cost you $100 but you can see another brand probably selling something almost the same at $20. You ask yourself how many pairs of shoes do they have to sell to keep a shop a life.
Let's have a hypothetical business and try to make sense of it:
Items : Price (Monthly)
Shop Rental: $15,000
Shop Staffing: $10,000
Marketing Budget: $1,000 (On avg, be it design print ad, what not.)
Utility Bill: $2,000
Others: $2,000 (Claims, MC, things got stolen, discount and blah blah.)
So say on average in order to keep this business alive it will cost you $30,000 minimum. So that is 300 pairs of shoes IF we sell at 100% profit. So base on 30 days we need to sell 10 pairs a day.
Question:
- Do we sell 10 pairs of shoes a day?
- Do we earn 100% profit per pair of shoes?
- And this is basically just to keep up with the cost, what about earning as the boss?
- And some shops don't even sell things which cost $100, what about those really cheap shops that sells things for $10 or $5?
So some business will have to cut cost in order to make money right? So how can some items be like $20? What do they earn? It's simply because their cost of the items can actually be -$5. How does that work? They save money by many ways, for example using illegal factories which doesn't belongs to them - save rental. Illegally dumping their by products and waste onto waste land or worst rivers which also save them a lot cause proper dumping are actually very expensive and last but not least, CHILD LABOUR. Which is the real subject of the day.
Above are my point of view and below is an infographic created by a group of very passionate young people!
So did we get your attention yet?
Find out more about child labour at Save Our Children.
You Can Make A Difference!
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Of course there are a lot of debates about child labour, people saying that they are giving the kids a job instead of them starving because anyway they are not fortunate enough to be at the school anyway. So I guess they have some point too BUT that being said, most of the child labours have very bad welfare from what I read or even from the infographics above and also this will only put them into a vicious cycle of below low skill workers cause of the lack of education and their next generation will fall back into the same routine.
So what's your take on child labour?