A fashion clearance--but it's not the prices that were slashed: a grad student gets H&M and Walmart to make sure their unsold clothes don't go to waste.

• Author: Dwyer, Jim
• Position: BUSINESS - Cynthia Magnus

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Cynthia Magnus was walking to the subway one night in December when she noticed bags of unsold clothing outside an H&M store in Manhattan.

To make sure that the garments wouldn't be worn or sold, someone had stashed them with a box cutter or razor. On a cord winter night, in a city where many are poor, brand-new clothes and shoes were going to waste.

"Gloves with the fingers cut off," says Magnus, a graduate student studying political. science at the City University of New York.

"Warm socks. Cute patent-leather Mary Jane school shoes, maybe for fourth-graders, with the instep cut up with a scissor. Men's jackets, stashed across the body and the arms. The puffy fiberfill was coming out in big white cotton balls."

The jackets were tagged $59, $79, and $129. Just a few doors down from H&M, Magnus found bags of unsold Walmart merchandise--hoodies, T-shirts, and pants with holes punched through them. Shocked at the waste, she dragged some of the bags home to Brooklyn, hoping someone could patch the clothes and make them wearable.

Magnus's discovery wasn't an isolated case.

In fact, vast quantities of unsold clothing are destroyed every day in the United States.

The reasons are complex: No store wants to compete with its own garbage, or risk having people show up seeking refunds on clothes they didn't pay for. And some businesses, concerned about their image, don't want their unsold merchandise to be worn by poor people, which makes them cautious about donating it to shelters and clothing banks.

Magnus wrote to H&M headquarters in Sweden but received no response. So she contacted The New York Times...