Is Shatnez-Checking a Multi-Million Dollar Industry?

Rabbi Abadi of kashrut.org has long since decried kashrus as a "multi-million dollar industry." That is a whole discussion in and of itself, and one which I don't know nearly enough to comment on. But I've heard a little about shatnez, and I would like to speculate on the possibility of that being a big money-maker.

One of my rabbeim once said that shatnez-checking is not necessary, at least for American suits. He said that the suits that have shatnez in them are so miminal in quantity to the ones that don't that we can rely on a rov. He admitted that the Hugo Boss-type suits would require checking. But the likes of Perry Ellis and Nautica? Not necessary, he said.

I think the shatnez checkers are useful in preventing people who buy fancy suits from transgressing the lavin. But when it comes to cheap American suits, do we really need to check them? After all, if we rely on a rove, we're fine! We're off the hook!

Let's say one would rely on the gemara's principles of rov and kol d'parish mayruba parish to eat a piece of meat. If the piece of meat is, in actuality, treif, was the guy over an aveira? No! He relied upon a rov, and once you do that, you're fine.

So for the purposes of full disclosure, why don't the shatnez companies say that if you get a Stanley Blacker suit, you're automatically fine? Instead, they advertise of the horrible chumros of shatnez, instead of the possible kulos involved. (One lab had a hat pasted on the wall, with a label saying "a young boy wearing this hat complained of headaches. Turned out, the hat had shatnez in it, which was causing the headaches!") And for a large family buying their children suits for yom tov, shouldn't they be spared the heavy expense of shatnez checking, especially if there's what to rely on?

Perhaps the mentality that "if someone wears shatnez, even if they're relying upon a rov, the tumah of the aveirah is still there!" comes into play here. And did they even have shatnez labs in Europe? Or is it a new thing?