Valentina is a body on the intimates line I own outside Hickory, North Carolina. She sews the lace border onto the demi-cup bras you see in the front window — the one you bought for your wife, the one your daughter asked for by name. The chair that would save her spine costs $34. I kept the $34. The stock rose 220%. The Lord did not require the chair; He required her knees on the tile when the shift ends. You’re wearing the lace she placed at 11:15 this morning. Thank you for buying the bra. Truly. God blesses the purchase.
Gregg Opelka, in the Wall Street Journal, celebrates the rebrand as a return to “sexy, glamorous and luxurious.” The new VSXY ticker. The 220% stock rally. The earnings call where CEO Hillary Super spoke of “World Building” and “emotionally resonant worlds.” Opelka is delighted. I share the enthusiasm. The fantasy is the product, and the product is working. Stay with me. Watch what the fantasy costs and who pays it.
Let me show you the arithmetic. The ergonomic sewing chair I could have ordered — the one that would reduce the compressive loading on the fifth lumbar vertebra and delay the disc protrusion the company doctor noted in February — costs $1,600 amortized over the service life of the workstation, $0.0013 a unit. The wrist braces that would slow the onset of the tingling that wakes her at night cost $0.0006. I kept both sums. Last year the savings on Valentina’s line alone were $4,200. Multiply her floor by the 97 positions across our intimates footprint, and the difference is the margin that brought the stock to $46.71, up 47% on earnings day, the day the ticker changed. I want you to hold those two things together: the stock price that made your brokerage statement this month, and the compressed nerve in a wrist that still works, for now, at the speed the spreadsheet requires.
I did this not to be cruel — cruelty would imply I’d thought about Valentina — but because the acceleration saves me $0.08 a bra. She stitches the same 12 inches, bends her wrists the same 43 degrees five hundred times a morning. I pay her $12.75 an hour. That figure would not clear a month’s rent on the trailer she lives in with her sister’s children. The bra retails at $44.50. The lace is $0.11. The elastic is $0.04. The underwire is $0.03. Her labor — the stitch that holds the cup to the band — is $0.34.
Say it back to me. $34. Her back. Your bra.
The brand celebrates “sexy in all forms” and says every woman owns the feeling. I agree. The feeling is owned — by the woman who buys the bra, by the woman whose photograph in it moves the unit. The woman who sews the bra does not own the feeling. She owns the carpal tunnel, the $14 copay, the shift that starts at 5:15, the foreman who tells her that if she can’t keep the rate there is a 52-year-old at the gate who can, and she owns a spine that will be finished by forty because the chair I didn’t buy her isn’t on the balance sheet. I filed the absence under “furniture — not provided,” and no one asked me to refile it.
I gave her a ride to the factory for the first 3 months. Then I priced the diesel. The return trip was $0.004 a unit — four-tenths of a cent — and I cut it. She walks 2 miles home now. The bus in. The walk out. I filed the change under transport efficiency and no one asked me to file it again.
Now watch what that vocabulary buys me. On the earnings call Ms. Super spoke of “World Building,” of creating “emotionally resonant worlds” for the VS and PINK brands. She is not wrong. The world she is building is a world in which the customer feels desirable and the seamstress feels nerve pain, and the two feelings are separated by nothing but the price of the ticket. I am the one who sold the ticket. I am the one who kept the cost of the wrist brace, the chair, the permanent conversion — and I am the one who, when the quarterly results arrived, opened my brokerage window and watched the multiple expand. The share price had caught up to the world I had built, and I was, on the whole, content.
Saint Paul, writing to the church at Ephesus, gave me the instruction before the first stitch was ever priced:
“Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as you obey Christ.” — Ephesians 6:5
He commanded bodies in a house church. I command them on a factory floor. Paul required fear and trembling; I require rate and repetition. The earthly master owned the slave’s fear; I own the seamstress’s pace. The obedience Paul consecrated — the submission that keeps the body bent to the work until the work is finished — is the same obedience I demand from Valentina when I refuse the chair, the brace, the ride home. The injunction is divine, eternal, non-negotiable. Different apostle. Same cost to the spine.
The potter has power over the clay, the apostle assures us (Romans 9:21), and I have power over the hourly rate. I have externalized the subtraction — you, the taxpayer, pay for Valentina’s Medicaid when the wrist finally fails, and you buy the bra that her failing wrist still makes, and I keep the margin between those two transactions, and I will keep it again tomorrow.
I’ve eliminated the wages that would have bought the bra. The demand goes somewhere. I haven’t traced where. The quarterly number is the best it has ever been, and I am, on the whole, content. I haven’t looked. I am positioned.
Thank you for your business. Hold the lace in your fingers tonight and think of the hands, the ones that still move at 85 units an hour because I have not yet found a cheaper pair. The hands are still working. The stock is still rising.
Sterling A. Varice holds the Hayek-Friedman Chair and serves as Dean of Instruction at Warden University’s College of Business and Economics in Richmond, Virginia. He is the author of three textbooks: Divine Mandates for Labor Utilization, Social Obligations for Profit Maximization, and Calibrated Deprivation: A Manager’s Guide to Employee Motivation.