Pop Quiz: You want to change your employee uniforms and need to know which sizes to order do you.
A. Ask your employees their sizes
B. Ask a clothing manufacturer to deliver uniforms based on population statistics
C. Ask your employees to take a picture of themselves in their underwear and upload it to an app
If you’re Dutch Grocery Store Albert Heijn, you picked C, and boy was this a bad idea.
The BBC reports that after they began the trial in one grocery store, they had to cancel it due to outrage from, well, everyone but the committee that approved this. The BBC says:
To keep reading, click here: This Dutch Grocery Store Asked Their Employees to Strip Down to Their Underwear and Take a Picture
There’s another option – the company that makes the uniforms sends a person over to take measurements, these can normally be taken over clothes (anecdata – they were when the company I worked for decided to do uniforms.)
I had to double check to make sure this wasn’t from the Babylon Bee. It’s getting more and more difficult to write parody these days, because real life is so ridiculous.
Dutch person here. According to a reputable national newspaper, the email sent to the staff was that this was “essential and mandatory”, although all the PR people talking to the press claim it was voluntary and that you didn’t have to participate if you didn’t want to.
And remember that Dutch labour law holds that 14-year-olds can stock shelves and 16-year-olds can check out groceries.. and that the minimum wage is lower for childen than for adults..
You’re telling FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLDS to send you UNDERWEAR PICS or else LOSE THEIR JOB!
This is – ew. Ew. EW.
I don’t come in this store often because it’s one of the most expensive stores we have, but I have half a mind to never come there again.
I just hope whoever thought of using pictures versus using actual measurements didn’t think thoroughly with the implications. Either that or they were trying to push the themism otherness on the entire crew claiming non-bias in sizing. One thing I know is you can’t generalize sizes in what uniform sizes you will have for the employees because that is clearly discriminatory. The way clothes are sized today is more than XS, S, M, L, XL, XXL, etc because the measurements are too varied by the manufacturer. This company should have found a way to send out the sizing information chart offered by the manufacturer of the uniforms (like the size charts that we all refer to when ordering online to find the correct size to order) and have employees state their preferred size to wear. After they have gotten this information they can place an order for enough uniforms in the needed sizes of the actual employees.
Unfortunately, the larger sizes do cost more to make (claims by the producer of cost of the “extra” material). This company sounds like they were trying to be both cheap and sleazy at the same time.
Perhaps the uniform manufacturer could have sent a selection of uniforms of various sizes to each location for the employees to try on. When I worked for a U.S. government agency that was planning a move to a new location (with work stations–we were getting rid of our old-style furniture), the agency bought various types of chairs in advance (while we were still at our “old” location). We could borrow these chairs, one at a time, to try out. Then, we informed our agency which chair we wanted for a new office, and the agency purchased a new chair for each employee. I was happy with my chair, because I had tried it out in advance.