Students with special needs turned away from Bath and Body Works at Chesterfield Mall (St. Louis, MO)

[Sherman A1]

A field trip to the Chesterfield Mall for students with special needs was disrupted Thursday when teachers say an employee at the Bath and Body Works refused to allow their group to enter the store.

Seventeen students from Fort Zumwalt North High School went on the trip to practice life skills, and were in small groups with staff to find stores and products in a scavenger hunt activity.

They were welcomed at other stores in the mall, but a worker stopped the groups before they walked into Bath and Body Works, saying they could not come in, Principal Joe Sutton said. The denial prompted some of the students to ask why they weren’t allowed to get things at the store.

(Now, this particular paragraph below, I find interesting as it offers a reason, granted a very bad one, but a reason and suggests just how very afraid the store level staff is of not making the "numbers" set by their corporate office).

The employee apparently assumed the group wouldn’t be buying anything and was concerned that if they walked past the sensor that tracks the number of people in the store each day, it would hurt their sales percentage.

http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/education/students-with-special-needs-turned-away-from-bath-and-body/article_97d8278f-159c-5bf6-a5ab-5528b4e07020.html

[djean111]

1. I am not saying that is a GOOD reason, but it speaks to the conditions that some people have to

work under these days. It probably would have taken someone much higher up the chain of command to make an exception or roll back the sensor count.
This does make me a lot more aware of the consequences to others of "just looking". Really fucking sucks for the employees.

[tabbycat31]

2. I used to work for Bath and Body Works

And while we've never turned away any customers, we will admit that the store is not for everyone.

We were under instructions from corporate to make the store heavily scented (burning oils, using room sprays, etc) even to the outside of the mall to draw people in (security hated us for it). For many people, just walking near our store would set off allergies. I can barely walk near a store these days because I've grown more sensitive to scents.

We didn't track customers walking in the store most of the time (although sometimes the greeter was given a clicker to punch whenever someone walked in) we did have a sales percentage that was tracked (ADS-- average daily sale). We hated it when groups of teenagers walked in and bought things like 1 tube of lip balm because it brought our numbers down.

I worked there 10 years ago and have no idea what the store's policies are now.