A New York City H&M has temporarily shut after a worker announced on Twitter that a customer had discovered clothes crawling with bugs, and whined that the site wasn’t doing enough about it.
Twitter user @Madesonee, who works at the H&M located in the Oculus at the World Trade Centre in Manhattan, said that the small brown bugs were witnessed crawling around on a rack of hoodies.
Madesonee shared images of the bugs, as well as her dissatisfaction with how the store handled it, which allegedly included roping off the area while keeping the store open and failing to inform other workers.
Her tweet has since gone viral, and a representative for the fashion company told a newspaper outlet that they’ve now shut the store out of an abundance of caution.
Madesonee shared several images on Twitter, revealing a rack of at least half a dozen light coloured hoodies crawling with multiple bugs.
She said that it was a customer who uncovered the pests on the sweatshirts, which were all new from a recent cargo.
She wrote that she works at the H&M in the Oculus at the World Trade and a customer found lice on a rack of hoodies, and they were not closing the store or were they informing their workers of the situation.
In another tweet, she said that the clothes hadn’t been on the rack for very long because they get shipments in every day.
She also said it was the first time she saw anything like that in the store, but advised that customers wash everything they purchase before wearing them.
The woman’s post quickly went viral, and a representative for H&M told a newspaper outlet that they were working to fix the problem, and they said that they take customer and employee safety extremely seriously and that out of an abundance of caution they’ve now shut the H&M store at Westfield World Trade Centre in order to investigate thoroughly.
Before H&M shut the store, however, commenters conveyed their disgust over the images, calling it a health and safety hazard, and one person wrote that it made them itch just looking at the photos, and someone else said that this was precisely why physical stores were dying day by day.
Several commenters called into question Medesonee’s description of the bugs as lice, saying that lice are actually much smaller, with quite a few insisting that they were actually bedbugs, but whether they were bedbugs or lice, it’s nasty either way.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 