alt Hacker News> It only benefitted the owners.
And the buyers. As a ballpark estimate, it would take around 50 hours of human labor to produce a shirt by hand, fabric plus sewing, versus about an hour of human labor by industrial machines. That lowers the cost greatly, which most consumers demonstrably value over custom tailoring.
At the time, the quality of machine-made clothes was noticeably worse than human-made. It's debatable wether the "consumers" (the term certainly wasn't used at the time) won in the end. Terry Pratchett's "Boots theory" feels relevant here:
> Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
> But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.