Lots of people want to buy their crap. Burberry’s sales are close to £3 billion last year (according to the first result from a Google search).
They are going to be just fine.
Any other sane company would deliberately engineer scarcity at the manufacturing stage to ensure and maintain high prices from the outset. But this seems to work for these assholes and the assholes who could not bear the idea that they might be unable to spend a fortune on a piece of tat because it was out of stock. Your theory is sound.
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Not a new thing obviously, I recall a story from some years ago with Walmart… Or some other retail chain destroying shoes and clothes rather than donate or discount them. Same with food, usually they prefer to toss food that’s still good
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Well, if they’re being honest anyways.
I gather that destroyed inventory you can write off the cost of producing it, and no more. They may have a way of cooking the books to increase (on paper) the production costs to increase their writeoffs. For example, shifting labor costs for the whole line onto just the unsold units.
If that’s the case, this seems like it will come back to bite them.
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The parent company charging the manufacturing subsidiary a large royalty for using the brand name on the sewn-in labels?
(I am not a tax accountant!)
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But you’d look so good in a pair of Perspex High-Heeled satin sandals!!
:
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This is one of the rare times you’ll hear me say “late stage capitalism” 
The math goes like this:
reduce price + increased sales = profit x
&
maintain price + destroy excess inventory = profit y
∴
when y is greater than x, destroy excess inventory.
It is the soulless, sociopathic math of the mythical Rational Man, who never gives to charity unless he can quantify a return on the gift exceeding its value.
(Usually, there are some non-mythical sensible folk stealing stuff off the burn pile - that’s where my sawzall came from in fact, though I admit nothing!)
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I thought the headline said “Blackberry.”
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And - they’ll deduct from their taxes as shrinkage.
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Haven’t book publishers done this forever - tearing off the covers to make them unsaleable?
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[quote=“Boundegar, post:11, topic:124636”]
Thrift store value or retail?
I know an alarming number of vintage dealers, who comb through thrift stores and estate sales, snatch up luxury goods on the super-cheap, and then turn around and re-sell them online. Naturally, some of the stuff is flawed or the style hasn’t aged well, so they mitigate their loss by just wearing it around. The hilarity of a young hipster running around with a genuine Chanel backpack or an old frumpster wearing Ed Hardy edition motorcycle boots in the snow is a hoot. When they greet each other, the first thing they do is show off their ridiculous ensembles and have a good laugh.
Edit: Oh, yeah…my Maaco-painted creaky, squeaky hatchback has Mercedes floor mats for just this reason.
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And more recently…
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Maybe we are doing tax incentives wrong if it’s more cost effective to destroy food to manipulate prices than donate it to the hungry?
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Yep. Used to work at the Aus/NZ warehouse/‘distribution centre’ of an English clothes and housewares company. Each season, huge piles of clothes came back from the stores and we had to sort them etc… so they could eventually be burned. When we asked why they couldn’t be donated to shelters, op shops (Aus version of thrift stores) or the like, we were explicitly told that their clothes would not be seen on homeless, poor or needy people. The one time we were allowed to donate clothes (only hecause they were “faulty” so the stores couldn’t sell them) we had to cut off labels, tags, even buttons so they couldn’t be identified as x brand. 
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Milk destroyed to reduce surplus – despite widespread hunger in America:
“41 million people struggle with hunger in the United States, including 13 million children. In 2015, 5.4 million seniors struggled to afford enough to eat.”
Is this the best we can do? Really?
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If it’s unsold gear, is it really worth the suggested retail price?
I’d value it as the cost to manufacture.
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Being able to afford incompetent executives might be considered a symbol of luxury in and of itself. You’ve heard of “conspicuous consumption”? This kind of wastefulness and inefficiecy might be called “conspicuous production”.
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They don’t just toss the food, they bleach and poison the dumpsters.
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At least back in the day, that excess milk was dried and stored or made into the infamous Government Cheese to be redistributed as direct food aid. But the US doesn’t do direct food aid anymore because the GOP decided they hate the poor almost as much as they hate paying taxes. Soon the replacement voucher program dreamed up by the GOP to replace direct food aid, SNAP, will also be gone.
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“Five pound blocks of cheese, bags of groceries …”
“Shooby-doo wop wop, say what yeah!”
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