A small village tailoring shop stitches only a modest number of clothes in a year

Why

The advice is not foolish — a machine really does cut the cost of stitching each garment, and in a busy workshop that saving is exactly why machines are bought. What it leaves out is that the machine has to be paid for whether it runs or rests. That price gets spread over however many pieces it makes: across ten thousand garments it disappears into a few paise each, across two hundred it can add more per garment than the hand-stitching ever cost. So the same machine genuinely lowers cost in one shop and raises it in another. Picture buying a bus to travel alone to work each day. Test: divide the machine's cost and upkeep by a year's realistic output and compare with what stitching costs now. The advice is not right in every case — it depends on volume, and 'always' is the word doing the damage in that sentence.