Hey, prime members, you can listen to business wars ad-free on Amazon music.

Download the app today.

It's summer, 1931, San Francisco.

On the fourth floor of the Levi Strousin Company factory, CEO Walter Haas stares at the

piles of folded blue jeans.

Tower after tower of Unso Levi's 501s, the denim pants that manual labor in the southwest

swear by.

Haas's brother-in-law and company Treasurer Daniel Kaushlin wanders over.

He stares at the nearest pile of jeans, or, as Levi's calls them, waste overalls.

You know how many waste overalls we got piled up here?

Haas doesn't reply.

He senses Kaushlin is eager to answer his own question.

I'll tell you how many?

Ten thousand pairs before the crash that would have lasted at six months.

Two years ago, the Great Depression killed the man for denim, and this pile has been growing

ever since.

In 1931, jeans are workwear.

Tough, durable pants were an exclusively by men who earned their pay through hard physical

toil, but now millions of those men are unemployed, and they're no longer buying jeans.

In two years, Levi's sales have tumbled from four to two million dollars.

It salesmen now return from field trips with empty order books and harrowing tales of

grinding poverty.

...