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How much do you think it costs to make a pair of Nike shoes in Asia?

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689 points taubek | 1 comments | 09 Apr 25 12:58 UTC | HN request time: 0.2s | source
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hx8 ◴[09 Apr 25 16:16 UTC] No.43633780[source]▶
> But if we bump the cost of freight, insurance, and customs from $5 to, say, $28, then they wholesale the shoes to Footlocker for about $75. And if Footlocker purchases Nike shoes for $75, then they retail them for $150. Everyone needs to fixed percentages to avoid losses.

I don't understand this paragraph. If Footlocker was okay with $50 profit/shoe, why do they need to claim $75 profit/shoe in their costs per shoe go up? The costs of handling the shoes, retail space, advertising, and labor are all fixed.

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ty6853 ◴[09 Apr 25 16:20 UTC] No.43633824[source]▶
Because the market recognized value add is the capital investment and returns, including the credit basis on which inventories flow. These people are operating on a per $ basis, not a per shoe basis. If the margins % lower then the capital will flow to something else more profitable and then prices rise until the margins are relatively flat across similar productive investments.
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1. amluto ◴[09 Apr 25 16:46 UTC] No.43634243[source]▶
I don’t think this is quite a sufficient explanation. If I were an investor / owner of a distributor or retailer, I think I would observe that these businesses don’t scale arbitrarily and I would care about returns as a function of cost of goods sold, operating expense, and of cost of customer acquisition. In this context, cost of goods sold will include actual wholesale cost as well as associated costs that scale along with it: insurance, shrinkage, samples, etc. Cost of customer acquisition will not scale as strongly with wholesale cost — one would need to advertise a bit more to convince people to buy a more expensive shoe, but this should be less than linear. And operating expenses (retail square footage, warehouse space, cashiers, shipping and handling) are almost independent of the cost of the pair of shoes.

All that being said, tariffs drive up the cost of living, which drives up wages, which makes everything more expensive.