Facebook war on H&M page
January 8, 2010Jon Brooks Comments OffAs described in our last post, the retailer H&M is suffering a public relations nightmare stemming from a New York grad student’s noticing on the street hundreds of unsold garments that it destroyed. Twitter, Facebook, and the blogs are all ablaze in condemning H&M for not donating the clothes to charity.
The H&M Facebook page is especially interesting, with quite a war of words going on between the pro and anti-H&M factions. (The store has a startling 1.5 million Facebook fans.) Numerous H&M employees are weighing in too.
Examples:
It’s hard to trust that “reevaluating what we categorize as “damaged”" doesn’t just mean, “In the future we will try not to let members of the public find all the clothes we throw out.” Former staff members from various stores across the country have confirmed it was standard to cut up and throw out garments.
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People shouldn’t be so upset before they are well informed. In the past 5 years H&M has given over $5 million to UNICEF projects and that’s just one example of what “good” they do.
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All of you slagging off H&M should read comments of myself and other employees of H&M and get a life ! Over 500,000 garments were donated by H&M last year! If an item is soiled it will not get donated but anything with small damages or rips are donated as they can be easily fixed and made use of.
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The homeless and those who are not as fortunate don’t care about damaged, weathered, stretched or used clothing. If they can wear it for warmth, it’s definitely usable. Donate all of it and let the people and the shelters decide what needs to be trashed.
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I live a short distance from your Michigan Avenue store in Chicago and will gladly come to your store any day or night to pick up your “damaged” “peed on” “pooped on,” “unsafe,” “unwearable,” etc clothing and will wash & repair every single piece of it to donate to the numerous homeless shelters in Chicago and the surrounding areas.
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H&M would rather destroy good clothes than see second class citizens wear them. True snobbery shows.
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If H&M can’t use ignorance as an excuse than either can any individual posting on here. You all shopped at this company without thinking twice about where all the unused stuff goes, you just mindlessly shop and shop and shop without having a clue aboutwhere you’re buying your stuff. Now you’re going to boycott and move on to some other big chain that probably does the same thing or pay people $5/week to make their clothes.
————————————————————————————————————–i love h&m. employee for 3 years! we do more good in other areas besides clothes! so, people who want to make it sound like we are doing something horrible, do some more research on the company.
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Absolutely loving this! Seems H&M has started delegating shop-floor assistants to raise support on facebook. Back to the point: garments found outside H&M’s 34th Street store.
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While I do respect the brand, I find that your damage control tactics are horrendous.surely there could have been another way to handle this, hence your US staff needs re-training
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Everyone needs to get their Sonia Rykiel panties out of a bunch! H&M is a caring company.
