Abercrombie & Fitch posts ugly sales; stock drops 8%

[KurtNYC]

The pricey teen retailer — whose CEO Mike Jeffries lately has come under fire for saying he doesn’t want fat people in his stores — posted an embarrassing quarterly sales drop that was made worse by kinks in its supply chain.

Abercrombie’s sales at stores open at least a year, or same-store sales, a closely watched measure of performance, plunged 15 percent in the first quarter — a shockingly steep drop that lead to a loss of more than $7 million and sent the company’s stock tumbling.
...
Particularly disgraceful, critics said, was the fact that the delays — which were responsible for two-thirds of the nasty sales drop — were caused by botched efforts to speed up the clothing deliveries.

“You’ve got to be a really poorly run organization to lose that many sales because you couldn’t get inventory into the channels,” one disgusted Abercrombie shareholder told The Post yesterday.

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/buyers_off_vTYdOd9INyJMOQhIEaZZiI

So THAT's what he meant by "cool kids"? The cold ones that have no shirts because he couldn't ship them to his own stores?

[CanonRay]

1. The idiot CEO will probably get a bonus and a raise

for screwing up the company. That's how corporate America works today.

[hrmjustin]

2. +1

[KurtNYC]

3. It's like golf -- low score wins. n/t

[Ron Green]

4. My wife and I accidentally wandered into one of

those stores a couple of years ago.

It was what I imagine Hell must be like.

[msongs]

5. maybe the hairless pretty boy crowd is cutting back on spending lately nt

[ismnotwasm]

6. Good

[SomethingFishy]

8. LMAO... freakin awesome...

She looks like a younger version of my wife.

[ismnotwasm]

9. Here's the article it came from

I love this woman

http://jezebel.com/this-is-the-perfect-response-to-abercrombie-fitchs-d-509013518

[SomethingFishy]

10. Wow, the letter was great...

Nice to see young people not falling for the bull...

Thanks for the link, and the discussions today! Most of my DU experience in the last couple years has been "why am I bothering with this".. but it's conversations like ours today that keep me coming back...

Hug those grandkids!!

[ismnotwasm]

11. I will

[SomethingFishy]

7. What I find amusing about this whole A&F "incident"

is they claim they want "the cool kids" wearing their stuff. Now maybe this is a generational thing but has the word "cool" changed meaning in the last 30 years? Because when I was in school a "cool kid" wouldn't be caught dead wearing something like A&F or Ed Hardy... The way we knew a kid was cool was from the band depicted on his/her t-shirt...

[KurtNYC]

12. Before the 1980s, and several times since (grunge), brand name stuff was very out.

But mass marketers can't sell what is really cool. They tend to sell the stuff referred to by this infamous quote:

Orange County is a place where people spend money they don't have to buy things they don't need to impress people they don't like.