Abercrombie & Fitch was charged with racial discrimination. And the once venerable clothier, which outfitted everyone from Teddy Roosevelt to JFK, has undergone a makeover. Here's his original report:The image of abercrombie & Fitch is now party-loving jocks and barenaked ladies living fantasy lives.
But all that fair hair and skin has made it a juicy target. It's being taken to court, accused of racial discrimination in their hiring. Does hollister clothing's all-American look exclude some Americans?
"All-American doesn't mean all-white," says Jennifer Lu, a student at University of California, Irvine, and a former salesperson at a Costa Mesa, Calif., store. Lu and several other young people say they couldn't get a job, or were fired because their look was not consistent with the store's look.Before this year's holiday sales begin, Correspondent Morley Safer has a look at a story that rocked the world of retail last year.
What exactly is the Abercrombie & Fitch look?But all that fair hair and skin has made it a juicy target. It's being taken to court, accused of racial discrimination in their hiring. Does hollister clothing's all-American look exclude some Americans?
"All-American doesn't mean all-white," says Jennifer Lu, a student at University of California, Irvine, and a former salesperson at a Costa Mesa, Calif., store. Lu and several other young people say they couldn't get a job, or were fired because their look was not consistent with the store's look.Before this year's holiday sales begin, Correspondent Morley Safer has a look at a story that rocked the world of retail last year.
"It's dominated by Caucasian, football-looking, blonde-hair, blue-eyed males; skinny, tall," says Lu. "You don't see any African-Americans, Asian-Americans, and that's the image that they're portraying and that they're looking for."
Liu says she was fired after corporate officials visited the store, and, according to her, didn't like what they saw: "A corporate official had pointed to an Ruehl No.925 poster and told our management at our store, 'You need to have more staff that looks like this.' And it was a white Caucasian male on that poster."
Anthony Ocampo says blacks, Asians and Latinos were sometimes hired by Abercrombie, but weren't given the opportunity to work in sales. "The greeters and the people that worked in the in-season clothing, most of them white, if not all of them, were white," says Ocampo. "The people that worked in the stock room, where nobody sees them, were mostly Asian-American, Filipino, Mexican, Latino."
The lawsuit alleges that Abercrombie hires a disproportionately white sales force, favors white employees for the best positions, and discourages minorities from even applying for jobs. But lawyer and conservative talk show host Larry Elder says too often cases like these end up in court.
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