PROGRESS!….I have spent the last 30 years of my life cutting tags out of shirts because I find shirt tags to be annoyingly itchy. This year, however, I received several shirts for Christmas, and all of them came sans tags. Like the Gap shirt on the right, the size and care information was imprinted directly on the shirt.
Hooray! But why did it take 30 years for this to happen? Was this a market failure, a market research failure, a regulatory failure, or a technological failure? Somebody needs to investigate this for me.
UPDATE: Over at LiveJournal, iocaste posts a Wall Street Journal article that sort of answers my question. Apparently labels really have become scratchier in recent years, and the reason is that less scratchy labels cost four cents instead of two cents. Government regulation also plays a role. However, still no word on why it’s taken so long for imprinting to catch on.
