Hollister Needs To Stop

This post has been brewing for some time. Every time it almost becomes manifest, something else distracts it, or something else becomes more pertinent. But with the Holiday Season here and most people spending more time at shopping centers, this post can no longer be denied.



HOLLISTER NEEDS TO STOP!!!!!!


Some clarifications before we continue:

• All of these examples are based upon the mall I most frequent. My mall is on the smaller side, which probably adds to the frustration.


• The Hollister in my mall is located extremely close to the JC Penny's, which is the store from which I usually enter the mall because of it's close proximity to Auntie Anne's Pretzels...those sugar cinnamon pretzels are phenomenal.


• I know other stores are guilty of what is about to be commented on, but those other stores don't exist inside this mall.
  

Why is it that Hollister and related popular and horribly over priced clothing stores feel the need to pollute their stores and subsequently the mall(s) with their offensive air perfume? What good does this do? I don't appreciate going into that store and then hating how I smell when I come out. The smell literally makes me sick because it is so overpowering. When you put on cologne you put on like what, one...two sprays at most? I remember when I was in 7th grade how awful the locker room would smell after gym class and the guys would be changing back into their normal clothes. They would use entire bottles or cans of cologne so that they still smelt nice. It made me sick, gave me a headache, and now I smelt like eight different fragrances because there were so many in the air. Hollister's air perfume is so strong and potent that it reminds me of a high school locker room. That's not a good thing. Also...can it be healthy to be inhaling that all day if you work there?

So the main complaint here is that Hollister is being horribly intrusive. Yeah I know that the smell literally reeks of "popular." Yes I know it is a marketing technique that most in some way be effective because Hollister is still around and charging young Americans $150 for a coat that looks exactly like a $45 coat that I saw at the Bon-Ton. (Which by the way...we say Bon- Tawn...but the word is spelt Ton...like..."felt like that weighed a ton." Why did this store purposefully mispronounce a word?) Also, I thought Hollister was a beach/summer themed store? Why selling these coats? Are they so unused to coats that have to jack the price to make up for all the initial investment for a coat pattern, coat engineers, and coat materials?

The smell wouldn't bother me if it wasn't so omnipresent. If it only existed inside the store and perhaps floated just outside of it so that a passerby might smell the air perfume and perhaps be becokened to enter this dark and mysterious place then fine. But I can smell it from almost every store in the mall. Especially when I first walk in at Penny's. I get halfway into the store and I can't even see out into the mall yet and I can smell Hollister, right by the escalators. I constantly hear Penny's employees complaining about the odor. It literally lingers throughout the mall as if a cheap undercutting ploy. Its like a witch doctor has created this sentient potion that goes out into the other stores and enters your body through your nose and implants a message into your brain as if it's hypnotising you: "Come...come to Hollister and spend more money for goods of a similar quality." When I"m at F.Y.E or Game Stop, or Spencer's Gifts (what...I like their hats) I don't want to be thinking about Hollister, yet it is impossible because of this horribly intrusive and repugnant odor.

Equally as intrusive is how the store front literally juts out into the mall thoroughfares. This picture show an example of how ridiculous a Hollister store front can actually be. It literally narrows the walking space in the mall because across from Hollister, in the middle of the walkway, is a T-Mobile stand filled with employees who just shout at you, "what kinda cell phone you got?" On the other side of that is an Aerie, which also used Air Perfume, but unlike Hollister, it stays inside the store and just barely filters out the front door. All this makes this particular stretch of the mall difficult to navigate because the Hollister side's smell makes me sick and there is seriously very little space due to how far out the store is, I want to avoid the annoying guys at T-Mobile, and I really have no reason to go into Aerie. Seriously, those two big pillars are like these giant hands trying to reach out to mall patrons and grab the money right out of their pockets, if only as a fee for, "smelling our scent."

So all in all Hollister needs to tone it down a notch. When I go to the mall, I want to go to the mall, not a huge Hollister. If I ever get a Hollister rep to read this, please please please pull down the lever on the air perfume. It's not good for anything really. Maybe if I go shopping at the mall after a football game and I'm all sweaty and gross but I didn't have time to shower, I'll hop into Hollister and let the air perfume saturate my clothing to help mask my smell, but that's really about it, and I usually don't go to the mall right after football games.

Did anyone ever think this: That smell is so overpowering that they have to go through a lot of it. Maybe the cost of that odor is so high, that's why Hollister has to charge an arm and a leg for their clothing. Maybe if they stopped polluting the mall air, their prices could be more reasonable.

Agree/Disagree? Leave a comment.