About a dozen teen protesters briefly shut down the Abercrombie & Fitch store on Market Street in San Francisco on Tuesday afternoon. Their unlikely cause: the retailer’s practice of perfuming the air in its stores, which the protesters charge could harm customers and employees.
— From Green Teens Get 'Fierce' at A&F at The Bay Citizen.
Good for them – the smell wafting (barreling like a freight train?) out of A&F is obnoxious.
It’s not something I’d protest over, but I’m really surprised they can find people willing to work there.
IFRA should rather torture and ban A&F instead of our scents 😀
Amen, ami!
True, true, true!
Ha!
It’s a private store to which nobody has to visit or give their patronage. These teens are wrong and militant to the point of being fascistic.
Can’t agree, but nor do I want to argue about it 🙂
In my experience, I can usually smell A&F at least several stores away. Even if you don’t go into the store, you can smell it.
In fact, I was in a mall, in a store opposite an A&F and in the first 1/4 of the that store, I could smell and hear the A&F store. I couldn’t even hear the music that was playing in the store I actually was in.
Interesting. I wouldn’t choose to protest, but the wafting perfume thing is one of the reasons I avoid indoor shopping malls. (I also hate crowds and noise. Thank God for stand-alone stores and the likes of Luckyscent!)
The scent of A&F is unspeakable but you cannot be harmed by it.
It’s not that I take this too seriously but these teens will grow to have the same “belief” about perfume being dangerous. I know far too many people harboring the same. It is a part of why you can bully the industry to change, remove or limit ingredients for no real reason.
I was thinking the same thing. I get tired of people being misinformed and thinking perfume is so deadly. I read something decrying perfume a while back where someone didn’t know that “aldehyde” does not mean “formaldehyde.”
I think people can get afraid of things that pose little if any risk- especially if they don’t like and need perfume in their life.
Interesting. I was thinking the exact opposite. That it’s places like A+F, Yankee Candle, and BB+W (not to mention poorly ventilated dept. store counters and/or the crazy practice of having poor SA’s chase after people with a spray bottle of the latest whatever), the over-applicators of the industrial scent world, as it were, who make people so utterly paranoid about perfume. So I was sort of cheering the teens on, thinking that they were making more room for people to smell the good stuff.
But I do see your point.
Actually a friend of mine, an indoor air engineer, just got a big grant to help stores study the quality of their air (and their ventilation system) and I strongly suggested he get A+F on board!
Yeah, you’re right about sensory overload (bad frags for sure) but some people just don’t like perfume anyway. I am sure there are air quality issues but probably things other than ambient smells.
Not for one minute do I believe it would do me no harm at all to work in a place that was piping in fragrance — ANY fragrance — all day long at that (A+F) level.
Did my share of mall work- I’m still here.
And I’m sure there’s someone’s grandpa who smoked for 70 years and died only of old age at 95, but… that doesn’t prove any point.
There are more important things, and certainly more important workplace “safety” issues, but I’d guess that inhaling that for 8 hours per day probably isn’t 100% benign, especially for teen employees who are still developing.
No no, you’re right, I didn’t mean to sound flippant. I hate the piped in smell. I just mean our feelings about smells won’t tell us about the air quality.
Hey Robin – Didn’t see the word “no” in your post – I thought I was posting a quick agreement (my post below looks rude). Totally didn’t mean that. You may be absolutely correct.
No worries — I did not think you were rude anyway! And my sentence was very poorly constructed.
I think they mean for people with athsma, it would also give you a headache with perfume constantly whifting around the store, leading to dizzyness, nausia and maybe fainting :/ it could get in your eyes and sting or irritate, or even affect the natural environment around your skin :/ they’ll say anything.
:O you know what. I just remembered, they do that in Harvey Nichols, there’s this woman who’s head of beauty (or perfume?) and she just gets a bottle off the shelf and sprays it all around her. now I thought they weren’t supposed to that because customers don’t want their sales assistant to smell like them, or in this case beauty manager.
Yeah, it’s the people with asthma and chemical sensitivites who have it the worst. A bad asthma attack can be fatal. I don’t have asthma, but I once sniffed a very high end fragrance at Bendels and had my first anaphylactic attack – my tongue swelled up and my throat started closing and I had to get the hell out of there. So yeah.
Also, the AF scent is a calone bomb that literally makes me gag. It probably won’t kill me, but I don’t care much for the dry heaves.
Yeah, dry heaves are totaly evil.
The air inside most people’s cars is more toxic than fragrance outside a building. That being said, I’m glad when anyone decides to rally a protest – it’s our right, right? Especially teens – hopefully it will foster a desire to be more involved in the world. AF should have been removed from all decent and interesting shopping years ago when the only reason anyone (read: grown men) cared about their catalog was to see ridiculous images of teens (male and female) all naked and draped over each other. The best place to stick an AF store is next to a landfill so perhaps it might improve the smells there.
Improve the smell of the landfill? Or improve the smell of the AF store? 🙂
I wonder if we could get some teens interested in picketing Lush in Bluewater? I dread walking past that place – I really do have to hold my breath. I can’t imagine what it’s like to work there.
A&F in London doesn’t smell of perfume. Presumably the policy is different there?
I literally laughed at: “Because it kills my sperm.” Jeez.
I honestly would love to read these studies. But that’s just me.
I don’t know. I always feel like hostile invasions go a step beyond a protest. However, at least this time, they didn’t destroy anything, as happens sometimes. I don’t like Abercrombie & Fitch but they think it works. If you’re not into it, chances are you’re not buying their clothes.
Personally, I think their perfume is great and can’t believe that a bunch of teenagers caused an esteemed business establishment to lose money over something rediculous. If you don’t like the smell, simply don’t go in. Some of us do like it’s signature fragrance.