Fashion retailer's insulting customer email goes viral

by Steven Mostyn - Sep 30 2011, 09:10

We here at Tech Herald Towers love silly, humorous, thoughtless or offensive emails that go viral. So, bearing that in mind, here comes a throwaway quickie that we hope helps start your day off properly.

The following email reply was sent to Keara O’Neil of Australia after she wrote a letter of complaint to fashion retail outlet GASP, in which she explained that one of its employees had openly mocked her size 12 figure and yelled at her accompanying party as they left.

According to O’Neil, the male assistant’s initial attentiveness and good humour quickly turned sour when she opted to not immediately purchase one of the party dresses she had tried on in the fitting room.

“By now I was extremely frustrated, and again told him I would think about it, [so] I walked back into the change room and closed the door behind me, only to have it pushed open with the sales assistant half standing in my change room whispering “I think you should just get it,” she wrote.

“When I gave him attitude and said rudely, “I already told you I would think about it,” he then replied, ‘With your figure I really think you should buy it,’” she added.

After sending her initial letter of complaint to the GASP store in question, the disgruntled Aussie bride-to-be (who also works in the fashion retail industry) received this distinctly unapologetic—and poorly written—reply from manager Matthew Chidgey:

Having now had the privilege of having both version of events, I am now in a position to respond to your complaint.

From the very outset, one thing that you should mindful of it; Our product offerings are very, very carefully selected, so to ensure that we do not appeal to a broad customer base. This is something which is always at the forefront of our minds when undertaking buying duties.

The reason for this is to ensure that we only carry products which appeal to a very fashion forward customer. This by default means that the customer whom is acclimatised to buying from “clothing for the masses” type retailers, is almost frightened by our range, sometimes we have found that this type of customer, almost finds our dresses funny, and on occasion noted comments such as ‘it looks like a dead flamingo’. When we receive comments like this, we like to give ourselves and our buyers, a big pat on the back, because we know we are doing our job right, and modus operandi is being upheld.

Our range is worn by A list celebrities to the likes of Kim Kardashian, Selena Gomez and Katy Perry to name only a few. Now, as one might appreciate, the style counsel for these types of celebrities are not ones to pick “run of the mill” type clothing, and they do so on the basis to ensure that the styles are cutting edge, and only worn by a select few. Similarly these items are priced such that they remain inaccessible to the undesirable.

Insofar as our employee goes; Similar to our product offerings, our employees are selected with a similar approach. Chris whom served you is a qualified stylist whom has a sixth sense for fashion, and Chris’s only problem is that he is too good at what he does, and as I am sure you are aware, people whom are talented, generally do not tolerate having their time waster, which is the reason you were provoked to leave the store.

Whilst I concede that you work for chain retailer, unfortunately that does not make us like for like. It is probably fair to assume, a lot of what I have said in this email, either doesn’t make sense to you, or you totally disagree with it all, which is what I would expect (unless of course I have you totally wrong – which I doubt).

Let me guess, you would never, ever hire Chris in the course of your duty, would you? This is the very reason, why your comment “from one retailer to another” is so disproportionate, it’s almost as though we are in totally different industries. Chris is a retail superstar, who possess unparalleled ability, and I am sorry you feel upset by him, but he knew you were not going to buy anything before you even left your house.

So if you would like to do us any favours, please do not waste our retail staff’s time, because as you have already seen, they will not tolerate it. I am sure there are plenty of shops that appease your taste, so I respectfully ask that you side step our store during future window shopping expeditions.

Thank you for your enquiry.

Source: Herald-Sun

Around the Web