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Politics : High Tolerance Plasticity -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: kodiak_bull who wrote (13170)	4/19/2002 1:17:50 PM
From: Libbyt	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 23153

but JCP and ANF seemed to have turned quite nicely. It will be interesting to see if this latest controversy with ANF effects the share price of the company. Just FYI. San Jose Mercury News, Calif., L.A. Chung Column Apr 19, 2002 (San Jose Mercury News Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News via COMTEX) Internal email on April 18 from marketing at Abercrombie & Fitch: It worked like a charm. We sold out of "Wong Brothers Laundry" Tshirts before noon at some West Coast stores. "Buddha Bash" was also moving strongly. With all that help from those irate college kids and the media, we won't have much stock to pull off the shelves by tomorrow. For our next move, let's ramp up on that fish taco stand Tshirt. The little mustachioed guy with the big sombrero is sure to be just as controversial so we need to get the whole line out for summer. My friends, we've been had. We saw it in 1998 with the furor over "Drinking 101" in Abercrombie's catalogcummagazine that Mothers Against Drunk Driving raised. We see it when parents rage against the nudity and implicit sex in each issue. Controversy creates aura. Did someone say offensive? Where can I get me some of that? Abercrombie knows its target market likes their rebelliousness and cavalier 'tude prepackaged and pricey. That explains why those shirts were snapped up by buyers some of them Asian as soon as stories appeared on newspaper front pages Thursday. Imagine, the humorless, politically correct crowd at college campuses like Stanford and UCBerkeley threatened a boycott over the shirts. Honey, you can't buy advertising like that. Well, you can, but it costs a lot of money. And then there's the question of what you would say. Maybe something like: "We're Abercrombie & Fitch and we're cool because we poke fun at everybody and if people are offended it's because they're not cool and have no sense of humor. If you're cool, you'll buy these hilarious tshirts of slantyeyed little men in conical hats. Wear them to the demonstrations in front of our store to show how independent and hip you are." But then again, it wouldn't be cool to cop to such mass manipulation. So instead we get quotes like this: "We're very, very, very sorry," said Abercrombie spokesman Hampton Carney. Uh huh. Our bad. Shoppers, please form an orderly line. They're herding us in like cattle. Pardon me while I moo. Better get your credit card and join the stampede to Abercromie. If there's any shirts left. You might have to check eBay. Not me. I fall so far out of their target, 1822 yearold market group that when someone says "A&F" as they've taught customers to say I mistakenly think of some New Jersey supermarket chain. The Abercrombie I knew was a fancy outdoorsmen's store. One of my friends' family still has an Abercrombie camping cookwear set for which they can't buy replacement pieces . . . unless a lowrise pair of short shorts would do. Still, I had to check it out. I dragged along my friend, Susan, who's from Ohio, where Abercrombie is based. "How do I look?" I asked, after donning a red Wong brothers laundry Tshirt, the Village People's `YMCA' thumping over the loudspeakers. "Can you see me buying this?" She wrinkled her nose. "Uh, no." That's what I thought. I heard too many workinginthefamilylaundry stories from my mother and father and aunts and uncles to think that "Two Wongs Can Make It White" is funny and worth giving a publicly traded company $25 of my hardearned money. But A&F doesn't seem to be marketing to Asians, really. This is no Benetton. The store's pictures of models are all so . . . "WASPy," said Nathan Holden, 30, an attorney who came with a shopping list from other attorneys. It was the talk of his office. It was so bad, it was funny. Maybe, he said, invoking Aristotle and waxing philosophical, it would encourage people to talk about it. Moo. "I'm going to be wearing it to get in every Asian American's face," said Rowena Ip, who is a buyer for a retail company and says she has taken plenty of Asian American studies classes. "I just think they should have a sense of humor." Oh yeah? Moo you, too. By L.A. Chung To see more of the San Jose Mercury News, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to bayarea.com (c) 2002, San Jose Mercury News, Calif. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.