Why I Detest Hollister

Just now, I tried on a pair of some Hollister khaki shorts I bought two years ago and immediately said to myself: ‘I’d love another pair of these in black’.

Then I remembered. Oh yeah. I did try to buy those in black last year and the experience was so traumatising I haven’t stepped foot in that place ever since, no matter how deceptively small the shorts make my bum look.

I mean, seriously. Who the hell came up with Hollister? How did these anti-shops come into existence? Did their makers sit round a table brainstorming about everything that makes a shop not work, and then decide to chuck all these features into several international stores?

Here are the main reasons I, as a disgruntled ex-customer, boycott Hollister stores from now on:

1. When you enter a Hollister store in the UK (I can’t speak for any other countries as my UK experiences have been enough to put me off frequenting their international establishments), you are greeted by a weirdly robotic beautiful person in tight jeans and flip flops, regardless of the weather outside, which as any UK resident will know, is usually rain. So far, so normal:

I wouldn’t mind if David Gandy said
‘Hey there, welcome to the pier’

a shop requires its salespeople to dress in a uniform. Fair enough. Where it gets bizarre is when they start speaking to you in fake American accents, saying things such as ‘Hey, what’s up?’ and – brace yourself – ‘Hey there, welcome to the pier.’ This may come as a huge shock to you, David Gandy wannabe, but you are not on a pier and neither am I. We are in the middle of Birmingham, which frankly looks more like a tribute to concrete than anything remotely resembling a pier.

2. I love music more than anything in the world apart from finding fifty pound notes on the street. Trust me, I really, really do.

Make it stop!

I’m always uncontactable due to listening to music so loudly I can’t hear my phone. But there is a big difference between listening to music of your choice in the comfort of your own bedroom, and being assaulted with the music of the skeletal Hollister salesperson’s choice in the discomfort of the store. It’s like being in a club against your will. Who wants to be in a club in the middle of a shopping centre at midday when you’re in a tracksuit with a looming sense of dread about the essay you have to do that day? All you want to do is buy the shorts you need and be able to communicate with your mother/friend/poor person you have dragged along with you to lie about how skinny you look without having to scream at the top of your voice to be heard, or to pop an Aspirin after just to stop yourself from weeping at the pain in your eardrums.

3. When most people try to come up with good ideas for stores, and how to sell their products, they try and think about where to put things in the shop, which lighting will be

An overpriced
Hollister T-shirt

most flattering on the clothes/food/bicycles or whatever they’re selling. Hollister’s thought process? I imagine it to be something like ‘we’re making the music so loud it’s like a club. Why don’t we just turn off the lights like in a club so people can’t even see what they’re buying?’ What you are buying, by the way, is basically a cotton T-shirt that cost fifty pence to make, but because it has that enormous Hollister sign over the front of it, they can charge about twenty five quid for it. And because it’s so dark, you won’t even realise you’ve been conned till later. Genius.

4. Here is the main reason I loathe Hollister (obviously it was going to be a personal anecdote related to my own self-consciousness, let’s be realistic). They don’t use the usual UK sizing charts that EVERY OTHER SHOP uses, for example Size 12, or even the European sizing charts, for example Size 40. They have their own special Hollister sizes (yippee). This means that unless you are a real Hollister aficionado who regularly carries around the shopping bags with a topless man in a romantic clinch on the front, you are going to have to ask a salesperson for help. My own experience of asking someone for help went like this:

Me: Hello.

Beaming Hollister girl (in American accent): Hi there, welcome to the pier.

Me (sighing): I have these shorts in khaki that I bought last year. I wondered if you had them in black?

Beaming Hollister girl (suddenly in Birmingham accent): Oh, sure. What size were you after?

Me: I don’t really get Hollister sizes. I think a seven?

Hollister girl (wide eyed, no longer beaming, about to faint, looking me up and down frantically): A SEVEN?! I don’t think we make them in that size.

5. There are so many popular fads nowadays that make me feel about a hundred years old, because I simply can’t see why young people of about thirteen years old adore them so intensely. Examples include Justin Bieber, Miley Cyrus, One Direction, Twilight and those really tight shorts that show half your arse and are very rarely flattering unless you weigh less than the baggage allowance on EasyJet. Another example is Hollister. Yeah, I admit I like my bum-disguising Hollister shorts from years ago. But in general, for all the reasons I’ve mentioned, visiting a Hollister store is the modern fashion equivalent of accompanying Dante and Virgil to the Inferno. So just stay away, unless you are a twelve year old girl, or enjoy coming to the realisation that you are getting old, and enjoy shopping peacefully without being accosted by weird stick-like smiling people who’ve never heard of a size seven.