That doesn't actually work very well for shoes and apparel. Demand is hard to forecast due to changing consumer tastes, and lead times are too long to adjust orders up or down quickly.

> But parasitic margins seem just as bad now as ever.

What parasitic margins? Retail operations have 2% to 4% profit margins, and even Nike has around 10%, maybe 12% some years.

That's pretty close. To put some numbers to it -

Operating income margins for 2019 (this is before taxes, and using pre-Covid).

Deckers 16%, Nike 12.2%, V.F. Corp 12%, Adidas 11.3%, Crocs 10.4%, Skechers 10%, Steve Madden 10%, Foot Locker 9.3%, Wolverine 7.5%, Shoe Carnival 4.8%, Under Armour 4.5%, Caleres 4%, Designer Brands Inc 3.7%

Look at what Under Armour charges and look at those horrific margins.

By comparison, big tech's operating income margins:

Facebook 42.5%, Microsoft 41.6%, Oracle 38.5%, Adobe 35.4%, Nvidia 33.3%, Qualcomm 31.7%, Intel 29.2%, Apple 28.7%, Google 28.4%, Cisco 27.5%, Netflix 21.8%, and so on.

Isn't most of that outside cost to manufacture though?

What does that mean? My point is starting a clothing company and using manufacturers in Asia is not going to bring any notable amount of riches due to not being able to earn “parasitic margins”.

All those can help for some types of business. But as we've seen from the supply-chain disruptions since the start of the pandemic, there's also a cost of cutting things close. You can choose whether to typically err on the side of too much or too little, and you can do things that lower the likely size and probability of the error, but you can't just decide not to ever get it wrong, and getting it wrong will cost money.