Abercrombie & Fitch (A&F) (NYSE: ANF) is an American retailer that focuses on casual wear for consumers ages 18 through 22.[3] With over 300 locations in the United States, the brand is now expanding internationally.[4] The company also operates three offshoot brands: abercrombie (childrenswear), Hollister Co., and Gilly Hicks. The company operated a post-grad brand, Ruehl No.925, that closed in early 2010.[3]
Italy, are all moving forward to provide more oversight of companies operating in Europe. Non-government organizations are also getting involved and pushing to globalize corporate accountability rules through the Organisation for Economic Co-operation Development (OECD).
The scandals in Europe highlight the risks that an insufficiently regulated continental economy poses for the U.S. As Europe begins to raise capital from markets and outside investors, including those across the Atlantic, those markets and investors are put at risk. American investors lost more than 1.5 billion U.S. dollars in the Parmalat scandal, and, with the growing number of European firms registered with U.S. stock exchanges, the harm future overseas scandals could do to the American investment community can only increase.
Things may get worse before they get better, as European capital markets open even more and become more central to private financing. History teaches us that scandals erupt after a strong inflow of new money – i.e., new participants from the public – into the capital markets. So Parmalat, Ahold, and other scandals are not necessarily outlier examples of good European businesses gone wrong; they are examples of what happens when a system outgrows the rules by which it has been guided. Europe is taking the right approach by continuing to raise the bar on CSR policies while also adopting many U.S.-style governance regulations to shadow its U.S.-style capitalism. However, this is no time for European and U.S. regulators, companies, stock exchanges/brokers, and investors to get complacent. They all can do more to improve the business ethics, corporate governance, and social responsibility of the global business community.
Multinational companies, governments, Europeans and Americans all must play a role in holding the business community accountable for ethical wrongdoings and poor social and environmental performance. The research revealed a business case for companies to take CSR, business ethics, and corporate governance seriously: Investors are starting to show signs that corporate performance in social and environmental areas is almost as important to the public as performance in financial areas, people expect companies to do it all - increase shareholder value, stay out of trouble, and turn a profit while acting responsible to its stakeholders.
Shareholders and customers will have the greatest impact on companies if they start holding multinationals more accountable for poor performance. The more individuals’ factor business ethics and CSR into their purchase and investing decisions the more responsible companies will be. Regulation can only go so far to curb corporate scandal. There will always be greedy individuals out there but if a majority of citizens stop buying a company’s stock and product executives will think twice about stepping out of line.
I have been following the drama of the Abercrombie & Fitch saga since it first hit the papers. A group of girls from a small ‘girl power’ type of organization arranged a “girlcott” of A & F to show their strong dislike of the retailers new line of shirts. I will hold my tongue for the moment on my own view of this issue and present some of the ‘facts’ about this unbelievable strike against the United States Constitution. Under this magnificent piece of legislature you are guaranteed the right to freedom of speech; while it doesn’t say “this includes items of clothing”, you have to take it with a grain of salt and take into consideration when this was written. As a defense to the girls of the girlcott, they too have the right to voice their opinions as well as the right to public assembly. They used this to stage mini demonstrations to ‘educate’ the public to the existence of these shirts and how they were degrading and demoralizing to females everywhere.
Tacky and trashy shirts are nothing new; go to any online t-shirt site and you can find everything from “I Slept With Paris” [Hilton] to “Manson For President”. T Shirt Hell is one of the places that sells some of the most inventive and offensive shirts yet no one sees them as a threat because they are tucked neatly away on the internet. What about the stores that sell shirts with saying like “Rape Me”, “Pedophiles Do It For The Kids” and an image of Charlie Manson’s death wave with the caption “Charlie’s Angles” under it? Aren’t these shirts offensive? Look at those shirts and tell me which are more offensive - ones that say “Available For Parties” and “Don’t Hate Me Because You Are Ugly” or the previously mentioned.
The way I see it, Abercrombie & Fitch were strong-armed into pulling their shirts by girls that have selective vision. They saw shirts that they considered offensive and sunk their brace laden teeth into it like a hungry pitbull that just picked up the scent of blood. The dividing line here is pretty obvious but not many people picked up on it. A & F is a company. They are in it to make money. Could it be that they created these shirts hoping that people would be offended and they would get some free press about it? If I were one of the officers at A & F I would have taken the ball and ran with it - don’t pull the shirts but take it on step further. Make shirts that say, “You Aren’t Anyone Until You’ve Been Girlcotted” or 㦨% Cotton, 30% Polyester, 10% Girlcott”. You get my drift. A & F made a bad call pulling some of the shirts, they set themselves up to be pushed around by other groups and organizations every time someone took offense at something that they designed and manufactured.
This brings me to the core root here - when did we, as thinking humans capable of making decisions, become automatons? Now stop and think about the big picture here. You don’t have to agree with the saying on the shirts or any of the arguments that the girls made - think of the repercussions that this could have on things outside the realm of fashion. What happens when someone targets a magazine or author that they feel is immoral? You might snicker at that but that has happened to my son; a few years ago he tried to purchase several books at a bookstore and the clerk refused to sell him several titles. His defense was that they were not appropriate for him to be reading “at his age”. I was a stones throw away and kept my mouth shut, this was his debate and he handled it well. When the clerk refused to sell him several of the books because they were “too advanced for him” and that he should “go look in the kids section” he took the high road. He picked up one of the books, opened it to a random page and stood in the middle of the store reading it out loud for all to hear. When the manager was called and both sides presented their case my won was the victor. The books were not labeled as adult or stickered with any type of parental warning so it was the judgment call of the clerk that prohibited my son from making the purchase. Was it age discrimination? Who knew that books like Dante’s Inferno and works by Poe and Hawthorn were so morally corrupt that an almost teen boy would be forced into ethical bankruptcy by reading them?
It doesn’t stop there. Wal-Mart is selective about what they sell in the way of magazines, books, music and movies yet you can go to the sporting goods department and buy a gun, bullets or a crossbow. What would happen if I started stopping people on the street and chastising them for what they are wearing? The term ‘fashion police’ gets tossed around a lot but what would happen if this did come to pass? Does that mean I could write someone a ticket for wearing a mini shirt when they clearly are pushing the fabric to its limits? What about the girls that are running around wearing a piece of dental floss on the beach and trying to pass it off as a thong? Again, this all goes back to selective vision; people see and get offended by some things and let others slide. Getting so embroiled in a debate over ink on a shirt is simply ludicrous. No one went after Ashton Kutcher when he started wearing John Deere baseball caps or Paris Hilton when she showed up at parties every week with a different trendy dog [who knows how many of them ended up at some animal shelter somewhere when they were no longer the “in” dog to tote around].
The girls that started this protest, in my eyes, are a complete joke. Instead of using their organization to voice their true opinions [and not those of their parents] and do some good in the world, they chose to waste the spotlight on something so insignificant as an Abercrombie & Fitch line of shirts. They talk about the lack of morals and the whole issue of ethics that surround the shirts. I say this, next month someone else will come out with something equally offensive and someone will protest it ... after a while the girlcott concept is going to backfire. People are going to push the envelope more and more and the masses will get numb to it. Your five minutes of fame will translate to millions of dollars in sales. So what have you really accomplished? An entertaining footnote on your college application? Knowing that you’ve protected us all from a piece of fabric?
They Say:
What kind of morals and ethics are Abercrombie & Fitch “pushing” on teenagers?
1. When did A & F take the place of a parent or parental unit and their roles at instilling morals in their children? No one is holding a gun to teenagers heads forcing them to buy the shirts.
2. What one person finds morally empty or ethically unjust can easily be called art by others. Case in point; one woman purchased one of the A & F “Who Needs A Brain When You Have These?” after having a double mastectomy and wanting to make light of recent surgery. Her interview was never featured on Today or Oprah or any of the other shows that grabbed the story and ran with it. The woman was not the least bit embarrassed about purchasing it or wearing it and used it as her personal platform to inform women of the importance of breast cancer screenings and mammograms. Basically she is saying that you need to have a brain if you want to keep your breasts ... brava to her.
3. With so many other issues that could be tackled, are pieces of clothing really worthy of a spotlight on a network news report? If we aren’t careful we’ll see our right to freedom of speech slowly stripped away from us. It’s already happening piece by piece in other aspects of the Constitution, if you doubt me, read the entire Patriot Act and tell me that there isn’t something “Big Brotherish” about some of the “rules” they established. Americans need to wake up and smell the coffee before it’s too late. Oh but wait, I wasn’t born in this country so I’m not really an American even though I pay taxes, vote and have that huge American flag in my front yard.
The Bottom Line
I started out wanting to voice my opinion on the utter absurdity of the girlcott and ended up going in a completely different direction. But in a way it’s still sort of on track. No where else in the world do people have such freedoms as to arm themselves, freedom of speech, pursuit of happiness and laws designed to protect them from illegal search and seizure. No were else do people have the right to due process or a trial by jury. No where else do people have a document such as the Constitution to protect them and their rights that were proposed and set in action by their founding fathers. Even with all of these things, we are bullied around by people who want to ‘protect us’ from ourselves. You may see it as a very loose connection but over time that gap will close and soon your rights as Americans will be your undoing. Today it’s people protesting a t-shirt ... tomorrow an ad slogan of a car company and pretty soon “freedom of speech” won’t be free ... it will be a fleeting memory that you’ll have to tell your grandchildren about ...
“Yes honey, at one point in time, we could say whatever we wanted without being beaten into submission.”
Italy, are all moving forward to provide more oversight of companies operating in Europe. Non-government organizations are also getting involved and pushing to globalize corporate accountability rules through the Organisation for Economic Co-operation Development (OECD).
The scandals in Europe highlight the risks that an insufficiently regulated continental economy poses for the U.S. As Europe begins to raise capital from markets and outside investors, including those across the Atlantic, those markets and investors are put at risk. American investors lost more than 1.5 billion U.S. dollars in the Parmalat scandal, and, with the growing number of European firms registered with U.S. stock exchanges, the harm future overseas scandals could do to the American investment community can only increase.
Things may get worse before they get better, as European capital markets open even more and become more central to private financing. History teaches us that scandals erupt after a strong inflow of new money – i.e., new participants from the public – into the capital markets. So Parmalat, Ahold, and other scandals are not necessarily outlier examples of good European businesses gone wrong; they are examples of what happens when a system outgrows the rules by which it has been guided. Europe is taking the right approach by continuing to raise the bar on CSR policies while also adopting many U.S.-style governance regulations to shadow its U.S.-style capitalism. However, this is no time for European and U.S. regulators, companies, stock exchanges/brokers, and investors to get complacent. They all can do more to improve the business ethics, corporate governance, and social responsibility of the global business community.
Multinational companies, governments, Europeans and Americans all must play a role in holding the business community accountable for ethical wrongdoings and poor social and environmental performance. The research revealed a business case for companies to take CSR, business ethics, and corporate governance seriously: Investors are starting to show signs that corporate performance in social and environmental areas is almost as important to the public as performance in financial areas, people expect companies to do it all - increase shareholder value, stay out of trouble, and turn a profit while acting responsible to its stakeholders.
Shareholders and customers will have the greatest impact on companies if they start holding multinationals more accountable for poor performance. The more individuals’ factor business ethics and CSR into their purchase and investing decisions the more responsible companies will be. Regulation can only go so far to curb corporate scandal. There will always be greedy individuals out there but if a majority of citizens stop buying a company’s stock and product executives will think twice about stepping out of line.
I have been following the drama of the Abercrombie & Fitch saga since it first hit the papers. A group of girls from a small ‘girl power’ type of organization arranged a “girlcott” of A & F to show their strong dislike of the retailers new line of shirts. I will hold my tongue for the moment on my own view of this issue and present some of the ‘facts’ about this unbelievable strike against the United States Constitution. Under this magnificent piece of legislature you are guaranteed the right to freedom of speech; while it doesn’t say “this includes items of clothing”, you have to take it with a grain of salt and take into consideration when this was written. As a defense to the girls of the girlcott, they too have the right to voice their opinions as well as the right to public assembly. They used this to stage mini demonstrations to ‘educate’ the public to the existence of these shirts and how they were degrading and demoralizing to females everywhere.
Tacky and trashy shirts are nothing new; go to any online t-shirt site and you can find everything from “I Slept With Paris” [Hilton] to “Manson For President”. T Shirt Hell is one of the places that sells some of the most inventive and offensive shirts yet no one sees them as a threat because they are tucked neatly away on the internet. What about the stores that sell shirts with saying like “Rape Me”, “Pedophiles Do It For The Kids” and an image of Charlie Manson’s death wave with the caption “Charlie’s Angles” under it? Aren’t these shirts offensive? Look at those shirts and tell me which are more offensive - ones that say “Available For Parties” and “Don’t Hate Me Because You Are Ugly” or the previously mentioned.
The way I see it, Abercrombie & Fitch were strong-armed into pulling their shirts by girls that have selective vision. They saw shirts that they considered offensive and sunk their brace laden teeth into it like a hungry pitbull that just picked up the scent of blood. The dividing line here is pretty obvious but not many people picked up on it. A & F is a company. They are in it to make money. Could it be that they created these shirts hoping that people would be offended and they would get some free press about it? If I were one of the officers at A & F I would have taken the ball and ran with it - don’t pull the shirts but take it on step further. Make shirts that say, “You Aren’t Anyone Until You’ve Been Girlcotted” or 㦨% Cotton, 30% Polyester, 10% Girlcott”. You get my drift. A & F made a bad call pulling some of the shirts, they set themselves up to be pushed around by other groups and organizations every time someone took offense at something that they designed and manufactured.
This brings me to the core root here - when did we, as thinking humans capable of making decisions, become automatons? Now stop and think about the big picture here. You don’t have to agree with the saying on the shirts or any of the arguments that the girls made - think of the repercussions that this could have on things outside the realm of fashion. What happens when someone targets a magazine or author that they feel is immoral? You might snicker at that but that has happened to my son; a few years ago he tried to purchase several books at a bookstore and the clerk refused to sell him several titles. His defense was that they were not appropriate for him to be reading “at his age”. I was a stones throw away and kept my mouth shut, this was his debate and he handled it well. When the clerk refused to sell him several of the books because they were “too advanced for him” and that he should “go look in the kids section” he took the high road. He picked up one of the books, opened it to a random page and stood in the middle of the store reading it out loud for all to hear. When the manager was called and both sides presented their case my won was the victor. The books were not labeled as adult or stickered with any type of parental warning so it was the judgment call of the clerk that prohibited my son from making the purchase. Was it age discrimination? Who knew that books like Dante’s Inferno and works by Poe and Hawthorn were so morally corrupt that an almost teen boy would be forced into ethical bankruptcy by reading them?
It doesn’t stop there. Wal-Mart is selective about what they sell in the way of magazines, books, music and movies yet you can go to the sporting goods department and buy a gun, bullets or a crossbow. What would happen if I started stopping people on the street and chastising them for what they are wearing? The term ‘fashion police’ gets tossed around a lot but what would happen if this did come to pass? Does that mean I could write someone a ticket for wearing a mini shirt when they clearly are pushing the fabric to its limits? What about the girls that are running around wearing a piece of dental floss on the beach and trying to pass it off as a thong? Again, this all goes back to selective vision; people see and get offended by some things and let others slide. Getting so embroiled in a debate over ink on a shirt is simply ludicrous. No one went after Ashton Kutcher when he started wearing John Deere baseball caps or Paris Hilton when she showed up at parties every week with a different trendy dog [who knows how many of them ended up at some animal shelter somewhere when they were no longer the “in” dog to tote around].
The girls that started this protest, in my eyes, are a complete joke. Instead of using their organization to voice their true opinions [and not those of their parents] and do some good in the world, they chose to waste the spotlight on something so insignificant as an Abercrombie & Fitch line of shirts. They talk about the lack of morals and the whole issue of ethics that surround the shirts. I say this, next month someone else will come out with something equally offensive and someone will protest it ... after a while the girlcott concept is going to backfire. People are going to push the envelope more and more and the masses will get numb to it. Your five minutes of fame will translate to millions of dollars in sales. So what have you really accomplished? An entertaining footnote on your college application? Knowing that you’ve protected us all from a piece of fabric?
They Say:
What kind of morals and ethics are Abercrombie & Fitch “pushing” on teenagers?
1. When did A & F take the place of a parent or parental unit and their roles at instilling morals in their children? No one is holding a gun to teenagers heads forcing them to buy the shirts.
2. What one person finds morally empty or ethically unjust can easily be called art by others. Case in point; one woman purchased one of the A & F “Who Needs A Brain When You Have These?” after having a double mastectomy and wanting to make light of recent surgery. Her interview was never featured on Today or Oprah or any of the other shows that grabbed the story and ran with it. The woman was not the least bit embarrassed about purchasing it or wearing it and used it as her personal platform to inform women of the importance of breast cancer screenings and mammograms. Basically she is saying that you need to have a brain if you want to keep your breasts ... brava to her.
3. With so many other issues that could be tackled, are pieces of clothing really worthy of a spotlight on a network news report? If we aren’t careful we’ll see our right to freedom of speech slowly stripped away from us. It’s already happening piece by piece in other aspects of the Constitution, if you doubt me, read the entire Patriot Act and tell me that there isn’t something “Big Brotherish” about some of the “rules” they established. Americans need to wake up and smell the coffee before it’s too late. Oh but wait, I wasn’t born in this country so I’m not really an American even though I pay taxes, vote and have that huge American flag in my front yard.
The Bottom Line
I started out wanting to voice my opinion on the utter absurdity of the girlcott and ended up going in a completely different direction. But in a way it’s still sort of on track. No where else in the world do people have such freedoms as to arm themselves, freedom of speech, pursuit of happiness and laws designed to protect them from illegal search and seizure. No were else do people have the right to due process or a trial by jury. No where else do people have a document such as the Constitution to protect them and their rights that were proposed and set in action by their founding fathers. Even with all of these things, we are bullied around by people who want to ‘protect us’ from ourselves. You may see it as a very loose connection but over time that gap will close and soon your rights as Americans will be your undoing. Today it’s people protesting a t-shirt ... tomorrow an ad slogan of a car company and pretty soon “freedom of speech” won’t be free ... it will be a fleeting memory that you’ll have to tell your grandchildren about ...
“Yes honey, at one point in time, we could say whatever we wanted without being beaten into submission.”
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