The Metropolis

This week in picking retail staff by submitting photographs to head office for approval

Darren Atwater | Tuesday 15 June, 2010 07:30

This week was a good week for discussion of retail outlets taking photos of staff to be judged by headquarters.

In the Columbia Journalism Review, Maureen Tkacik wrote about Abercombie & Fitch’s ‘weekly practice of purging its stores of hourly sales associates it deemed to be less than, in corporate parlance, “brand positive.”’:

The purgees were identified, a former regional manager explained, every week at corporate headquarters in New Albany, Ohio, during a conference call held specifically to critique photographs taken that week by the chain’s hundred or so district managers of all the “brand representatives” they had encountered in visits to their stores. The photos were uploaded onto some sort of company intranet, but my source told me his boss preferred printing them out on paper, so he could circle flaws, draw mustaches, scrawl racist epithets, etc. The source said braces, minor breakouts, the faintest possibility of weight gain, showing up to work in a prior season’s ensemble, wearing shoes that had not appeared on the list of authorized footwear for that season, and/or belonging to an ethnic minority could all be grounds for immediate dismissal from the ranks of Abercrombie & Fitch’s minimum-wage cadre of demand creators.  

Over at Gawker, they claim that American Apparel has a Full body, head-to-toe, hiring policy.

[A] new policy now says that in order for current AA employees to be approved for a promotion or raise, they must also have their photos approved. As they put it, “Your looks determine your position and pay rate, not how effective you are at your job.”

Our source says that these employee photos have become standard operating procedure, though the more objectionable aspects go unspoken; for example, district employees who don’t like someone’s photo may refer to them as “off brand,” rather than overweight or unattractive, though the effect is the same.

Gawker’s full coverage can be found here.

---