I wonder if anybody is keeping track of everything a mid size business needs to take care of. Each particular report probably sounds like a reasonable request, but by now they're probably well into hundreds, and they're all outside the actual scope of the business (e.g. it may seem manageable for the bureaucrats designing them, because that's what they deal with all day, but not for a small organization doing... something else).
In fact there was a study by an American law school that came to the conclusion that the US has more bureaucracy than many European countries…
Recommended read: https://www.andybudd.com/archives/2026/04/the-lazy-myth-that...
‘Europe’ is not substitutable by ‘Germany’: a one state counter-example does not substantiate a disproof of a union. Texas is not representative of how U.S. patent law works. Florida is not representative of how U.S. business regulation works. So, the recent HN post about German incorporation slowness fails, in isolation, to disprove the claim above that the US is more regulated than the EU; you’ll need to make your own case (or relevant citations!) about the EU (or Europe) rather than just Germany to be taken seriously here. Do you argue that “many” is the minority case out of all European countries? Are you evaluating difficulty weighted by GDP? Are you evaluating EU and non-EU together or separately? etc.
> The debate around chlorinated chicken was never really just about chicken. It became a symbol of something larger: the fear that “market access” would become a polite way of saying, “please lower your food and safety standards so our companies can sell more easily into your market.” You can dismiss that as protectionism if you like. From a European perspective, it often looks like defending standards that citizens broadly trust.
Chemical washing of chicken is a safe and effective way to reduce pathogens. European food agencies agree that it's safe and effective, there's really no dispute about this, and in the US that's the end of the regulatory story. But in Europe the regulators see it as their job to consider esoteric second order effects: if we make it too easy to clean your chicken meat, might that cause you to underinvest in efforts to keep pathogens from getting there in the first place? It might, and the status quo achieves acceptably low rates of foodborne illness, so there's no need to permit innovations in chicken processing.
It's true, I would concede, that regulatory agencies requiring businesses to do stuff in a way that citizens consider normal will produce strong standards that citizens broadly trust.
At the end of the day people want to impose their morality on on others. Whether it is crazy Christians or leftist eco warriors- don't let them take away your freedom. Keep on buying shit from China.
You only write a report if you want the exemption.
The hypothetical business you're imaging shouldn't be looking for an exemption.
The law's effect on small business is conceptually not too different from eg laws against dumping toxic sludge.
Small retailers that process returns by taking the item out of the envelope, studying it, and then putting it back up for sale (either at full or reduced price, depending on new or cosmetic defect) will be entirely unaffected because their production costs vastly exceed their return inspection costs and they’ve been recording ‘sellable’ vs ‘worn’ vs ‘cosmetic defect’ somewhere this whole time anyways (or else they’d collapse even without these regulations!), and medium businesses will likely find their profits temporarily reduced — but since they were disposing of sellable products to begin with, they can either sell them to recover profits, donate them to reduce taxes, or accept the fractional inspection charge against profits and continue as-is.
Some possibilities: Reduce production defects (slower production/qa times), return rate), Reduce size variability (slower production/qa times), Improve fabric quality (higher production costs, lower future sales), Provide more detailed sizing charts (higher sales cost, lower return rates), Provide more consistent sizing (eg. band size 85 is not 80-90cm between different models and different brands), Reduce production batch sizes (less waste, more shipping costs), Reduce overseas manufacturing (higher cost production, lower cost/time shipping), Sell entire batches until sold out (increased inventory costs, maintains brand wealth-image), Donate wearable clothing to charity (tax deductions, goodwill), Switch from overseas large-batch production to domestic JIT (reduces inventory of never-sold products to zero), and so on.
But for you to do your "small organization", shouldn't you be required to have to consider the environment around you?
A bar of course doesn't want to care about the noise the patrons do on the terrace for example, but because we live in the world with other people, they do have to care about this, even if it's "something else" than what they want to do.
Or data centers as another (maybe more contemporary) example, where sometimes they have things that needs to be disposed of in a certain way. Yes, the data center operators aren't in the business of "toxic waste management", but if you want to run a data center, you need to figure out how to deal with the byproducts.
I don't think clothing companies should somehow be magically excepted from having to care about others.