Productive vs. Unproductive labor?

Miscellaneous Current Events
1

Tell me what you think of this:

A used clothing store (Plato’s Closet [secondary retail market]) takes an employee out of the store and pays them to design and build a blog for the store. The reason being, likely, advertising (through social networks).

Advertising on the internet is a relatively difficult thing to do. Most advertisments are born of cookies that have been snooped from your browsing history or through the normal channels of ad placement on related websites (which costs money, blong links do not). So, you are seeing advertisments from places that you’ve already been or places related to the places you’ve visited. You can not easily bring advertisements to people who have not already expressed interest in, this case, a secondary retail market. Used clothes; not a big market.

Could one say that the store has taken productive labor away from the realm of “productivity” because the relevence of the new task is so low in its effectiveness? The store must now pay an extra person to do the labor that the web designer used to be doing.

2

Difficulties in marketing for free - yes. Unproductive labor - not necessarily.

I also wouldn’t underestimate the demand for gently used clothing, especially in this economy.

Retail is cut-throat as it is. The store would be competing against consignment stores and thrift stores. Pricing in this area is key, as is quality. Shoppers in this particular market niche are pretty knowledgeable and very picky. They also a driven by bargains and sales. A broad-based internet campaign is probably not the way to go about it. It takes a different strategy than if you were one of the bigger retailers. Big retailers also have inserts in newspapers and huge marketing campaigns just to compete for business. A small-time used clothing place cannot compete in that arena, and should have a much more focused marketing campaign.

3

I would say that, from an Austrian perspective, unproductive labor is labor that did not actually achieve the desired ends.