Steve & Barry’s [is]  a clothing chain where everything costs less than $10….At its 264 barnlike stores in malls across the country, including the perpetually mobbed one at the Manhattan Mall in Midtown, Steve & Barry’s offers an assortment of flowery sundresses designed by Sarah Jessica Parker ($8.98).

The question, again, is how.

They opened the first Steve & Barry’s store at the University of Pennsylvania in 1985 with the idea of selling licensed collegiate designs at much lower prices than the campus bookstores.

Steve & Barry’s saves big, for example, by opening stores in underperforming malls, where the owners are more likely to negotiate rents and offer other incentives; by building its own bare-bones store displays; by maintaining only a small public relations office in Manhattan; and by manufacturing in countries like China, India, Madagascar and more than 20 others, including the United States.

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Wow! Can you believe this? A company saves big by keeping bureaucracy small and by watching wasteful spending on extravagant displays and by doing things themselves. Government should take notes. Also, they rely on an open market to find the lowest production costs.

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Though the prices will raise concerns that the clothes are made in sweatshop factories that underpay or otherwise exploit workers, Mr. Shore and Mr. Prevor said absolutely not.

Howard Schacter, the company’s chief partnership officer, said Steve & Barry’s monitors its subcontractors carefully and demands ethical business practices. The key to its low prices, he said, is a razor-slim profit margin.

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Until we have reason, I will give the business owners the benefit of the doubt as far as concerns go with sweat shops.  Ethics are important and certainly are good to keep a lasting business. I mean you think what happened to Enron won’t happen to you, if you’re dishonest? Honesty is consequential. At least these guys have transparency.

Now these guys are making a slim profit from this business, they could probably make more if they charged more for the clothes but that isn’t what they’re all about. Thankfully, we can still take home a lesson for the government. Government needs no profit. So, if government operated half as efficiently as these guys, they should be able to cut spending costs.

I wonder if these guys think that their business could afford to purchase groceries for one of their employees that just stops working and has a baby.

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Then, too, Steve & Barry’s doesn’t advertise, but rather relies on word of mouth.

Steve & Barry’s also saves small — for example, by using discount hotels, like Motel 6 and Econo Lodge, for travel, assigning one printer to 50 employees and myriad other ways.

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Maybe public servants should live like servants and stay in discount hotels too. Nah, I actually think our public servants deserve more pay when they do a good job. Also, why would smart people want to go into politics when they can make more in business? Offering to make people rich could draw more smart people into politics. That’s an idea. More competition produces better quality in the labor market, why not in politics?

What we could do, since we’re talking small scale, is create personal incentives for our congressmen and women. That is, we could say for every one hundred dollars you spend on earmarks and pork, you lose one dollar from your discretionary spending account. So if you spend $400,000 on one pork barrel project you just bumped yourself from one week in the Hilton penthouse to the Motel 6. Or forget Nordstrom’s, you’re shopping at Men’s Wearhouse, I guarantee it. I don’t know if this would make a difference to our politicians but incentives are the key and as Mark Steyn has pointed out, the further away someone is from the consequences of a decision the more likely they are to make a bad decision.  It is an inverse relationship. So, bring home the consequences of decisions.

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On a tour of their offices, where designers’ cubicles are retrofitted into dreary, sometimes windowless nooks, Mr. Shore and Mr. Prevor pointed out aging furniture that Mr. Prevor found in his parents’ basement and a filing cabinet that bore the logo of a fruit-and-vegetable distributor.

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Here’s another idea for a new law, all government furniture has to be purchased at Goodwill, Salvation Army, or some other thrift store. It helps charity and cuts costs. Okay maybe this isn’t very realistic.

I’ve heard it said that government can’t be run like a business, but why not. I think this business is amazing. I know retailers usually markup their merchandise around 400%. These guys don’t just reduce the markup; they find ways to cut the cost presumably because they want to make a profit and because it is satisfying to be the best at what they do.

Government probably can’t use the same examples that this business uses to reduce the spending costs, but they can use the same strategies. Anyone who thinks that government will ever be close to efficient as a business without any incentives is fooling themselves.  Why not give government officials incentives to save money, such as personal profit, and why not keep government small? It works in a business. And that is the lesson for our government to learn.