In both the richest and poorest countries of the world, critics of the used clothing trade are not hard to find. More than 30 countries effectively ban the import of used clothing, either through outright prohibitions (e.g., Botswana, Malawi) or impenetrable bureaucratic walls (e.g., Ethiopia, Morocco).¹ Even when imports are allowed, the barriers are often daunting, even by African standards. Tariffs can be prohibitive, and some countries require convoluted health certifications as well. The use by many African countries of preshipment inspection (PSI) companies—essentially privately run Customs authorities—has led to charges of overvaluation, corruption, and simple ineptitude.

The barriers to the mitumba trade have in large measure been erected by the groans of the local textile industry, which echo those of Americans threatened by Chinese T-shirts in 2008 or British threatened by Indian cottons in 1720. The industry’s groaning obituaries and ominous employment trends are of course more poignant in Africa than in North Carolina, but the essential message of doom and gloom is the same. In Kenya, more than 87 textile factories closed between 1990 and 1998, and similar tales of industrial demise emanate from Zambia, Uganda, and Tanzania.² About 30,000 jobs in Zambia’s textile industry have been lost in recent years, approximately the same number that have been lost during the same period in North Carolina.³ In at least one case, a large fire was set in a mitumba market, allegedly by textile workers threatened by the trade.⁴

The fascinating twist, of course, is that while North Carolina has lost its textile industry to low-wage workers from China, the African textile industry has lost to the high-wage workers of America, who live in a land of such plenty that clothing is given away for free. How, indeed, can anyone, even China, compete with free? What’s worse, critics charge, is that the swells of mitumba not only shrink employment in the textile factories, they also keep Africa from putting its foot on the development ladder offered by textile manufacturing—a ladder, as we have seen, that has lifted China, the United States, Japan, and countless other countries into the industrial age.

There is little evidence, however, that the African textile industries—at least in many countries—would be flourishing but for mitumba. The African press is riddled with derisive comments about the quality and price of locally made products, and with references to poor management and the failure of the local textile corporations to serve their customers. The Tanzanian textile industry, ironically, seems to have withered long before the flood of mitumba, and now is recovering even in the face of swells of used clothing imports. While protected from these used clothing imports—and indeed while protected from virtually all textile and apparel imports—output per worker as well as capacity utilization in the Tanzanian textile industry fell by approximately 40 percent.⁵ Furthermore, as numerous cases show, producing for export rather than domestic production is the more effective industrial development ladder, and mitumba presents no threat at all to African export markets.

As for employment, while mitumba may destroy some jobs, it very clearly creates others. A drive through the large mitumba markets in Dar Es Salaam shows a level of economic activity unmatched anywhere else in the city and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people who are very clearly working. The traders, importers, sorters, and launderers who people the mitumba trade show an astonishing variety of skills, and the tailors, in particular, are a marvel of the employment created by mitumba. Not only do the tailors adapt Americans’ clothing to the thinner African figures, they create blouses and shirts to match “new” suits, and they turn curtains into dresses, socks into bathmats, and skirts into tablecloths and tablecloths into skirts. Though empirical estimates of the job destruction/creation patterns are impossible to come by, Gulam Dewji is convinced that the mitumba trade has created many more jobs than it has destroyed. In his peak years, Gulam Dewji had more than 100 people employed in sorting, grading, and distributing used clothing, more than had ever been employed in most Tanzanian textile mills.

The moribund textile industry in East Africa is testament not so much to mitumba but to the handicaps faced by African manufacturing in general, which are in turn similar to the handicaps faced by the African cotton farmers. While some of the blame must be borne by rich-country policies such as subsidies and trade barriers, textile factories are in trouble in Africa for the same reasons that factories of any kind are in trouble in Africa: corruption, political risk, low education levels, insecure property rights, macroeconomic instability, and ineffective commercial codes—in a phrase, bad governance.⁶ To use Thomas Friedman’s technology analogy, Africa has a better operating system than it used to (capitalism vs. socialism), and its hardware (roads, ports, communications) is improving. But much of Africa lacks the software (effective police and courts, enforceable rights and laws, transparent regulatory frameworks) necessary for factories to operate successfully.⁷ A recent Oxfam report concludes that the challenges faced by the African industry are due less to the used clothing trade than they are to “supply-side” constraints such as “unreliable and expensive infrastructure; the cost and availability of materials; outdated capital stock and lack of access to credit; and inadequate training and management skills.”⁸

Yet if the plight of the textile industry is testament to bad governance, the vigorous mitumba trade is testament to the entrepreneurial energy and resourcefulness of the African people. A decade or so ago, it was common for observers to draw a line between the “formal” and “informal” sectors of African economies, and to assume that the development of the formal was to be encouraged and the informal discouraged. Yet today, at least some countries realize that it is the informal sector that should be encouraged; this, after all, is the part of the economy that is working. Further, some experts have pointed out that so many types of activities are now lumped under the heading “informal,” the category has lost much meaning, and our Westernized perspective has led us to label as “informal” most organizational forms that do not look American.

While it is clearly desirable for African countries to develop the institutions to support organized and formal economic activities, we should also laud the fact that the mitumba trade and other similar activities have provided a step out of the village as well as a step up the economic ladder for people who did not have factory alternatives. While Western business students study entrepreneurship, Geofrey Milonge lives it, and the entrepreneurial training ground provided by the mitumba trade can only bode well for the future of all types of economic activity in Africa. In just a few short years, Geofrey had evolved from a small time trader to full participant in the global economy, complete with real estate investments, English language skills, and travel to London. More than any other person in this book, Geofrey’s life had improved since we first met. It is a generalization, though not an absurd one, to say that the informal economy in Africa works better than the formal economy, and to suppress the part of Africa that is working seems to be a counterproductive prescription.

In fact, even as the mitumba trade has been liberalized, the state of Tanzania’s formal textile and apparel sector has improved considerably. In 2002, Tanzania gained duty-free access for its apparel exports to the United States when it qualified for textile benefits under the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA). Though success in the post-2008 quota-free world is by no means assured, the signs are encouraging, and Gulam Dewji believes that Tanzania can hold its own against China in a few niche markets. Apparel exports to the United States from Tanzania increased by more than 300 percent between 2003 and 2007 and exports of all goods to the United States nearly doubled.⁹. Several mitumba dealers in Dar Es Salaam told me proudly that, for the first time, clothing produced in Africa is now showing up in mitumba bales from America. Gulam Dewji and his sons are bullish on Tanzania’s textile industry: With profits from the mitumba trade they have purchased and refurbished several textile factories with an eye on the immense American market, and at its mill on the northern coast of Tanzania, METL is producing T-shirts for export to America.

Promise for the African industry, then, lies not in closing the doors to American used clothing but in opening the doors to the American market. AGOA, though riddled with provisions authored by the U.S. textile industry, is a step in the right direction.

Shadowy Middlemen and Economic Democracy

Many critics of the mitumba trade suggest darkly that if Americans only knew what they wrought by throwing away their clothing, fewer people would be lined up outside the Salvation Army trucks. News accounts invariably imply that the donors who drop off their clothing have no idea that the clothing will likely be sold to “middlemen” who will earn a “huge” profit from the donor’s largesse. Of course, with so many sinister insinuations in the news, perhaps the secret is now out. But what is unclear is what the critics would have done with the donated clothing instead.

Some have argued that clothing donated for charitable purposes should simply be donated to Africans. The difficulty with this prescription is that it has proven impossible to suppress the mitumba trade even when commercial imports are banned. Donated clothing quickly makes its way to mitumba markets, though the trade becomes more illicit and hidden. Researchers in Sweden cite evidence from several countries that suggests donated clothing is unlikely to reach those who have a true physical need for clothing but instead is rapidly sent into the markets.¹⁰ Researchers have also found that clothing intended for refugees in Asia efficiently enters the market. Clothing given away in this manner will still enrich a middleman, but it will be an illegal one.¹¹ And whether we like it or not, charities are no match for markets when it comes to giving people the clothing that they need or want. Trailer loads and shiploads of clothing are often donated following natural disasters such as hurricanes, but without people like Ed Stubin and Geofrey Milonge to match clothing with customers, most of these donations rot in warehouses. Charities are ill-equipped to provide the sorting, grading, and distribution functions so ably provided by Ed and Geofrey, and so most disaster-relief organizations nearly beg the well-intentioned not to send clothing to disaster areas.¹²

Banning mitumba imports, as, for example, South Africa has done, simply leads people to find ways around the barriers. Just as the British could not be forced into woolen underwear once they had tried cotton, denying mitumba to people who have tasted access to cheap and fashionable clothing is next to impossible. In countries where used clothing imports are banned, smuggling along porous borders is rampant, and used clothing is often found hidden in shipping containers. Banning the trade only drives it underground to enrich crooked border guards rather than legitimate businesspeople.

As for the huge profits, it is often said that huge markups are de rigueur, exploiting both the charity and the African customer. Critics point, for example, to the men’s khakis that sell for $8 in the mitumba market but were purchased for perhaps 10 to 12 cents from the charity. Even a cursory look at the economics of the industry, however, seems to rule out the possibility of huge and easy profits. Ed Stubin estimates that the majority of the goods flowing into his business are sold at a loss, because the selling prices for clothing destined to become wiping rags and fiber (between 2 and 8 cents per pound) are significantly lower than the price paid to purchase the material (between 10 and 14 cents per pound). For Ed Stubin, for example, the “huge markups” on clothing destined for Africa must cover the losses he incurs on fiber and rags as well as his 80-person payroll and factory operating expenses, not to mention, for Tanzania, a 25 percent tariff. The fact that a “huge profit” is made on the pair of perfect khakis obscures the reality of just how unusual this snowflake is both for Geofrey Milonge and for Ed Stubin.

Media accounts of the used clothing trade also seem to have a magnetic attraction to the word shadowy. After spending time with the industry’s players, however, I wonder whether it is judgmental observers rather than shadowy behavior—whatever that is—on the part of the players that is the more interesting phenomenon. The used clothing dealers I encountered were from varied backgrounds and ethnicities, and had in common nothing more shadowy than the quick wits and market awareness needed by gazelles who wake up to race every morning.

The notion that global trade is about powerful corporations peopled with well-tailored Waspish vice presidents is belied by the reality of the used clothing exporters, who are from Brooklyn, Brownsville, Pakistan, and India, in short, from Main Street rather than K Street or Wall Street. Far from shadowy, they represent a heartening parable about economic democracy: It is a positive, not a negative, that people from across the American experience can form the backbone of a successful global industry, and can play and win in a global game of faster-better-cheaper, and do so without the walls that protect their peers in many other industries.

The democratizing influence of the mitumba trade extends to Africa, as well. As John Quinn has argued, the policies adopted by most Sub-Saharan African countries following independence resulted in a concentration of political and economic power that has few parallels in modern history.¹³ As is true for much of the cotton agriculture industry in Africa, state ownership and control excluded and impoverished those at the bottom of the power structure. The policies—especially state ownership—allegedly implemented to lift the masses instead funneled money and power to the top, where it was dispersed as largesse through a web of patronage and corruption.¹⁴ State ownership of the textile industry by an unelected government enriched the few and excluded the many, and Geofrey Milonge and his present-day colleagues in the mitumba markets had little participation—either political or economic—in such a system. The mitumba trade, however, is run by the masses rather than the elite, and is governed by relationships among importers, customers, drivers, menders, and dealers rather than by what many observers have titled the “kleptocracies” still common in much of Africa. Mitumba not only has allowed ordinary people to dress well, it has let them into the club as well. Excluded from the elite clubs and without effective software to govern formal markets, African entrepreneurs rely on the relationships, trust, and social networks that have been created by the mitumba trade. Thanks to mitumba, Geofrey Milonge and his entrepreneurial peers are players now, and are finding their own way around Africa’s challenges.

A final critique of the mitumba trade is the humiliation argument. How, critics charge, can Africa hold its head high while wearing clothing that has been cast off at least three times? While in Tanzania, I heard about ideologues who protested the humiliation wrought by Tanzanians wearing the white world’s castoffs, but I did not meet any of them. Gulam Dewji and his sons told me that their numbers were dwindling rapidly, as most of the old ideologues were now clothed in mitumba as well; 300 years ago, even the English woolen workers eventually preferred cotton underwear. Gulam and his sons never had any patience for the humiliation argument. They pointed out, over and over again, that humiliation comes not from mitumba, but from having no clothes to wear.

There is something missing from both the critiques and the compliments of the mitumba industry in Tanzania: Whatever the economic costs and benefits of the trade, it is clearly true as well that mitumba is fun. I found that taxi drivers, shopkeepers, and high school students—far from being embarrassed—delight in talking about mitumba. The challenge and reward of shrewd shopping are as significant in Tanzania as they are in suburban America. Just as a sharply dressed soccer mom might drop her voice and whisper, “Can you believe it? I got it for $5.99 at Wal-Mart,” Tanzanians delight in their fashionable mitumba finds. Over and over again, Tanzanians pointed out their natty clothing to me, and then dropped their voices, smiled, and said, “Mitumba.” Shopping for mitumba is a fun and rewarding pastime in Tanzania for the same reasons that Americans enjoy trips to the mall. Yet the mitumba markets in Dar Es Salaam are more interesting, and much more full of surprises, than any suburban shopping mall. While Americans have a relatively good idea what will be on display at the GAP, or at Sears, the mitumba shopper is not so much on a shopping trip as a treasure hunt: You just never know what the Americans will throw away next.

As Karen Hansen noted in her study of the used clothing trade in Zambia, the appeal of mitumba is not in emulating Westerners but is instead in the desire to be smartly turned out. Zambians, Hansen argues, make the West’s clothing their own, and the ensembles they put together from shopping in mitumba markets reflect Zambian, not Western, cultural norms.¹⁵ And while some would argue that mitumba fills basic clothing needs in much of Africa, Hansen finds that it is wants rather than needs that are satisfied by mitumba. An afternoon spent browsing the mitumba markets to piece together the perfect outfit is not about protection from the elements, or about trying to look American. It is, rather, about the fun and reward of being a smartly dressed and astute shopper.

Finally, it is hard to imagine a global industry with a more compelling environmental story to tell, and the used clothing trade stands to benefit considerably from increased attention to environmental issues. Without polluting chemicals or processes, the industry recycles virtually 100 percent of the textiles it receives, which are already considered a waste product.Today, most of the material comes from charities, but in the future, textile recycling may develop in the same manner as it has for glass, paper, and aluminum. In 2007, nearly 12 million tons of municipal textile waste was generated, and approximately 15 percent of this was recovered for reuse or recycling.¹⁶ Though the percentage of textiles recovered has been increasing, it is nowhere near the 50 percent recovery rate for paper. The untapped opportunity—for Ed Stubin, for Geofrey Milonge, and for the environment—is vast. In the used clothing trade, what is good for business is also good for the planet.

Tanzania—indeed much of eastern Africa—has seen dramatic regime change over the past two decades as policies have shifted to market liberalization. In many cases, the policies have been less than voluntary, as many countries have had to adopt “Washington consensus” policies of liberalization in exchange for IMF and World Bank lending. Critics of the new policies feared that liberalization would lead to declines in already low standards of living, reduce the level of public services, and cause declines in farmer incomes. Unprepared and ill-equipped to compete in world markets, Tanzania, critics feared, would be pummeled by market forces that would leave the least well-off in even worse straits.¹⁷ On the other side, the World Bank advanced the now-familiar argument that liberalization offered the best hope for Africa’s poor.¹⁸

Tony Waters set out to settle the debate for himself.¹⁹ Carefully researching conditions in a small rural village in western Tanzania, both before economic liberalization (in 1985) and after (1995 to 1996), Waters found that neither the alarmists’ nor the optimists’ predictions had come to pass. Things were not much better, and not much worse, in the tiny village. Even with the radical regime change, Waters found that life in rural Tanzania was about the same. The people of Shunga village are still ruled more by the earth’s rhythms than by the regime in Washington, or for that matter, the regime in Dar Es Salaam. The houses looked the same, as did the school, the shops, and the roads. People seemed neither richer nor poorer, better off nor worse off. What happened in Washington and Dar Es Salaam did not seem to make much difference at all in rural Tanzania, and the more Waters searched for change the more things looked the same. Waters concluded that at least in this small remote village, nothing had really changed.

But there was one thing Waters noticed, almost as an afterthought: People were better dressed. This may seem a small thing to us, but because it is the only thing, it is important to the people in Shunga. Thanks to world trade, and thanks to Gulam, Ed, and Geofrey—who race like gazelles every day through the global marketplace—life was just a little better in a remote corner of one of the world’s poorest countries.

Don’t Look Now, but China Is Behind You

While relations among U.S. used clothing dealers are intensely competitive, the industry as a whole would seem to occupy a secure place in the global industrial landscape. Rich Americans buy more and more clothing each year and therefore unload more and more, as well. The falling price of new clothing—particularly from China—will only accelerate this trend. In addition, the growing penchant for recycling will likely divert increasing amounts of clothing from the waste stream. Together, then, continued rampant consumerism as well as changing waste disposal practices would seem to assure a growing supply of American used clothing for the global market.

Growing demand appears to be a safe prediction, as well. Trade barriers to used clothing continue to fall, thanks both to SMART’s efforts and to the general trend toward import liberalization in most countries. Perhaps more important, the poorer countries continue to have high rates of population growth, as well as a growing attraction to fashionable clothing.

There is a natural economic success story here, a simple market dynamic that portends well for the future. At the end of the T-shirt’s life, there is a refreshingly simple story of a winning business for America and for Tanzania, a link between Ed Stubin and Geofrey Milonge that is built on market logic rather than a web of political intrigue. While the U.S. textile and apparel industry is kept alive only by unnatural acts of life support in Washington, and U.S. cotton producers compete through politics, here is another business, mostly unheard of and largely ignored, whose promise lies in the simple matter of a compelling economic logic.

At the end of my T-shirt’s life, it is refreshing, too, to see a real market in action, to see prices that move with the location of a collection bin or the time of day, where anyone with a bale is allowed to play. Such flexibility is the result of the faster-better-cheaper race that Stubin and Milonge engage in every day from opposite ends of the world, where everyone must keep their eyes on the markets and attend to numerous fluid relationships with customers, suppliers, and competitors. The used clothing trade is a dance of the gazelles with no protection from the lions. It is a marvel to watch.

Thankfully, here finally is a business that at least should be safe from low-wage competitors, especially from China. It is not a big industry or a sexy industry, but it is a secure spot for both Ed and Geofrey. China has only a limited tradition of charitable giving, and incomes are still far too low to allow for large volumes of castoffs. The comparative advantage of U.S. clothing recyclers lies in America’s wealth and consumerism, both characteristics with staying power even given the challenging economic situation of 2008, and both characteristics in which China is far behind. And this relentless consumerism creates the supply that allows Geofrey to continually expand his business.

But in fact, by 2008 both Geofrey Milonge and Ed Stubin were very worried about China.

Every day, Geofrey sees more new clothing from China in the shops around Dar. Often the clothing is “seconds” from manufacturing runs destined for Europe or the United States, or just as often the labels and logos are pirated fakes. For now, customers still prefer the “old” clothing from America to the new clothing from China, Geofrey said, because the quality is believed to be better. But prices of new clothing from China have been falling while prices of old clothing from the United States have been rising, and Geofrey expects that over time the quality of the Chinese clothing will improve. And the relatively strong performance of the Tanzanian economy in recent years exacerbates the China threat. Geofrey worries that as incomes rise, the preference for new clothing will increase.

Ed Stubin’s worries are a bit more complicated. After talking with Ed again in 2008, I realized that today, his business is now also a political creation of sorts, and that what politics creates it can also destroy. In a fascinating linkage, Stubin’s business now at least partly depends on the Auggie Tantillos in China. Unlike the U.S. textile industry and cotton farmers, Stubin gets no help or protection from the U.S. government. Strangely enough, in yet another unintended consequence, Stubin’s protection is now coming from the government of China.

Under pressure from its own textile and apparel industry, the Chinese government has long banned the import of used clothing into the country. While this ban might seem to threaten Trans-Americas’ business, in fact the reverse is true.

Stubin’s business creates value through its highly developed skills in grading and sorting. These skills can take a truckload from the Salvation Army in New Jersey and quickly get winter coats to the Ukraine, T-shirts to Africa, blue jeans to Japan, and high-end vintage wear to shops in Manhattan’s East Village.

The first leg of a T-shirt’s journey from Trans-Americas to Africa begins with a truck ride to the port of New Jersey. It costs Trans-Americas about $700 to send 50,000 pounds of clothing on the short ride. The ride to Africa costs another $5,500, a journey of a month and a half with a stop in Europe. Container shipping is yet another industry ruled by clean market forces. When the supply of empty cargo ships at a given port swells, the price to load the container and send it on its way falls. America’s rampant consumerism has implications not just for the supply of used clothing available to world markets, but for shipping costs as well.

Thanks to our penchant for consumption, in 2007 the U.S. merchandise trade deficit swelled to $711 billion. The billions spent on French wines, Chinese T-shirts, and German cars not only was unreciprocated, it also left hundreds of cargo ships at U.S. ports begging for something to ship back. At the broadest level, the merchandise trade deficit in the United States means that shipping stuff into America costs much more than shipping it out.

The price of shipping from America, however, reflects not just America’s trade deficit, but also the demand for cargo ships elsewhere. Therefore, in cases where a country has a large imbalance with the United States, shipping costs will be unbalanced as well. The U.S. merchandise trade deficit with China was $156 billion in 2007, with imports from China approximately five times greater than exports to China from the United States. While the 2008 trade deficit with China was expected to narrow with the economic downturn, a significant bilateral imbalance is projected for years to come. This means that shippers are keen to get ships from New Jersey back to the ports of Shanghai and Guangzhou in order to deliver more goods to America, but there are relatively few goods waiting to board the ships. In order to get ships back to China, the shipping companies in 2007 were dropping their prices to desperate levels: A 50,000-pound container of clothing could be shipped from New Jersey to China for approximately $800, about the same amount as it costs to send a truck from the Stubin factory to the New Jersey port. Even so, many containers return empty to China.

Given the shipping pricing trends that result from the U.S. trade deficit, Ed Stubin sees how at least some of the U.S. clothing recycling industry could shift to China. When I spoke to Stubin in 2004, he thought that it was possible that China would open its borders in the Export Processing Zones (EPZs) to used clothing. EPZs are an intermediate step between free trade and closed borders: Goods are allowed into the country for assembly or processing and subsequent re-export, but are not allowed into the domestic marketplace for consumption.

If used clothing were allowed into the EPZs, Stubin told me, Chinese firms could buy in bulk from the U.S. charities, ship to China for next to nothing, and do the sorting right there in the EPZs; the clothing would never even have to leave the port. The workers would make $1 per hour instead of $10, and all of the other costs would be a fraction of America’s, too. The total shipping costs from the United States to Africa, even with the extra leg added onto the trip, could be lower than they are now. In other words, the low labor costs that give China an advantage in so many other industries could create an advantage in grading, sorting, and selling America’s castoffs as well. Indeed, Stubin told me in 2008, much of the grading and sorting had recently moved to the EPZs in India; exports of American used clothing to India more than tripled between 2004 and 2007.²⁰ Because these goods were unsorted, the growing exports had bypassed U.S. firms such as Trans-Americas.

If China, too, opened its EPZs to American used clothing, the challenge would only be magnified. If cotton can travel from Texas to China to become a T-shirt, and then travel all the way back to the United States to be worn a first time and then to Africa to be worn a second time, then certainly a return trip to China would not be a major detour. Ed Stubin is not a cotton farmer or a textile mill owner, so it doesn’t even occur to him to look to Washington for help in facing international competition.

But under this scenario, Stubin told me in 2008, there would still be a secure (even if smaller) spot for Trans-Americas. Stubin would still have the advantage of his worldwide network of customers who had come to rely on him for high-quality clothing, delivered quickly as the climate or fashion trends demanded. Perhaps most important, Stubin would have time on his side. Though China might beat the United States on labor costs, the extra month or so required for another trip to Asia would simply be too long to wait for many participants in this fast-paced market.

Remarkably, more than 2000 years ago, in Politics, Aristotle endorsed the concept of EPZs. Along with later writers from Rome, Aristotle had a fundamental mistrust of international trade. While he believed that some international trade was a necessary evil, he also believed that trade should take place behind walls, so as to influence the domestic economy as little as possible, and also to protect the citizenry from unhealthy influences. Ordinary citizens, Aristotle believed, should not even be allowed into the areas where trade took place.²¹ Under the EPZ model, trade activity, in effect, should be quarantined. Domestic business, and domestic sensibilities, should be protected. I think of Aristotle whenever I visit Chinese EPZs today. Every one I have visited has had a military guard at the gate.

From ancient Greece to modern China, the EPZs have been a compromise between free trade and protectionism, between globalized markets and self-sufficiency. The EPZs are designed to allow small swells in, but to stop big waves. The full force of the global economy is stopped at the gate. The EPZs also represent a step toward globalization for countries such as India and China: A generation ago, most of the goods now allowed into the EPZs were not allowed in at all.

For now, Stubin is fully protected from Chinese competition, because America’s used clothing is not allowed even into the EPZs. All of the Auggie Tantillos in China are protecting not only the Chinese textile industry but the American used clothing industry, as well.

But if Stubin believes that he could survive the opening of the EPZs in China to used clothing from America—because he could still excel at the game of faster-better-cheaper—he is also sure that under a true regime of free trade, Trans-Americas would be in trouble.

“Let me take that back,” Stubin said to me in late 2008. “If China let everything in, we wouldn’t be in trouble. We’d be gone.”

China, Stubin told me, needs everything Americans throw away. With open borders, Stubin believes, the trucks would load unsorted mountains at the Salvation Army offices across America and put the containers directly onto ships bound for China. The enormous country covers the climatic gamut, so there would be demand for winter coats in the north and lightweight clothing in the south. The striking income inequality means that the tastes of over 1 billion people will run the gamut as well. The chic young people in Shanghai and Beijing would snap up the hip vintage goods and the Levis, and the poor peasants of the west would snap up the utilitarian blankets and boots. The factories could use the shop rags, and the shoddy would be turned into furniture and stuffed animals.

If China were to really open up, Stubin believes, there would be little left for Africa and nothing left for Trans-Americas.

The logic and the math play through Ed Stubin’s mind sometimes. He thinks about everything he and his family have built, how his father Morton settled in Brooklyn as an immigrant, and how the used clothing business raised three generations of Stubins. He is worried that his son’s generation will be the last.

Ed Stubin is a gazelle with no walls to keep out the lions, so he doesn’t have much time to think about all this as he runs every day in a faster and faster race. But Stubin understands markets, and he respects them. He also understands that even though he is one of the industry’s bigger players, he is actually very small. Stubin is confident that his family will continue to successfully navigate the markets for a while, just as it has for more than 60 years. He is confident that for a while Trans-Americas will continue to adapt and survive—thrive, even—in the global race of faster-better-cheaper. But Stubin feels the global winds blowing against the side of his new factory in New Jersey. The wind gets stronger every day, and it is coming all the way from China.