Bitterwallet has a friend called Joe Madden who for years has been silently enraged by the shitty designs on the front of T-shirts sold by most of the UK’s fashion retailers. His particular bugbear is the deployment of the meaningless logo, usually including the name of a place and/or a number or year.

You know the sort of thing – ‘N. Jersey Atlantic Docks 1990’, ‘Eagle Flame 2000’, ‘Santa Barbara 1976’. Then there’s ‘Casdia Reef Fishing Tour’, with Casdia Reef being an entirely made-up place. It’s enough to make you chew your own elbows clean off.

But Joe has decided that silent rage is no longer the answer and he’s gone public… with a blog, helpfully called Meaningless T-Shirts. In order to fill that blog with examples of the garments that infuriate him, he went on a shirt-snapping shop tour at the weekend. Yes, we know he should probably find something more constructive to do with his time but, like, whatever.

All was going well on his mission until Joe was accosted by a member of staff in H&M, who informed him that it was strictly forbidden to take photos, “because you could be working for another store, who might want to copy our designs.”

It’s tempting to argue that if Joe was in fact practicing industrial espionage, he’d be a little sneakier and take the T-shirts into a changing room before photographing them. Hell, if nicking the design of the ’22 Offense-Defense Full Contact Beach Patrol’ T-shirt was so important, he’d probably stump up the price of one and copy it back at the office.

Later on, in Primark, the same thing happened to Joe again. As he says: “…this time by a Primark floor manager who called over a jumbo-sized security guard to forcibly delete from my camera any photos taken inside their store.” No, really. This really happened, for crying out loud.

Joe goes on to imagine a secret agent filing his report, deep within the bowels of a typical clothing retailer’s HQ: “Yeah, I got the pics alright – nearly got collared in New Look, but I kept my cool. You ain’t gonna believe what Primark are up to. Brace yourself: they’ve got a sweatshirt that says 1982 Canoe Systems. We’re in real trouble. 1982! Why the hell didn’t we think of that? I want our entire team working on some 1982 designs, ASAfuckingP!”

But don’t worry readers, he’s still got pictures of over 50 shitty T-shirt designs to add to his blog, and he’ll happily receive any others you can send his way. In the meantime, the best thing we can all do is to boycott the purchase of crappy T-shirts with silly, pointless words and numbers emblazoned all over them.

What’s that? You already were boycotting them? Oh, okay. Keep it up troops.

There’s only one thing worse than chavs (aside from typing Blue Waffle into Google and hitting ‘I’m feeling lucky’ – really, don’t do it) and that’s French chavs. Witness the devastation unleashed when H&M rolls up the shutters at their new store Toulouse; inside, limited edition garments to celebrate the opening. It’s like watching a swarm of locusts on crack.

[LiveLeak] * it’s in Paris, I know

H&M – that clothes chain you’ve probably seen on the High Street – has made a whole bunch of people angry. Is it a row erupting over sweatshops? Has it sparked white-knuckled fury over rubbish working conditions for the staff? Maybe it’s shitty customer service?

Well, it’s none of these things actually. The spat has come about over bags full of slashed clothes.

You see, what’s happened is that someone called Cynthia Magnus, who is a student at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, found that H&M routinely slash and bin unsold garments. In particular, workers at the NYC store chop up clothes with box cutters and throw away bag after bag of clothing.

This, of course, is particularly badly timed as New York currently sits in one of the coldest winters it has had in yonks and of course, hasn’t escaped the worldwide recession and the subsequent unemployment and homelessness problems.

Magnus told the New York Times about what she found: ‘Warm socks. Cute patent leather Mary Jane school shoes, maybe for fourth graders, with the instep cut up with a scissor. Men’s jackets, slashed across the body and the arms. The puffy fibre fill was coming out in big white cotton balls.’

Naturally, H&M wasn’t going to stick fingers in the collective ears and hope this all went away (not when there’s twats like us preying on the mistake of every company we stumble across).

In a statement, the company said: ‘We donate garments that do not meet our quality requirements to organisations such as Gifts In Kind, UNHCR, Caritas, the Red Cross and Helping Hands. However, we do not donate clothes that do not meet our safety requirements, chemical restrictions or are damaged…. We are currently looking into if we can further improve our routines.’

One thing remains unclear however. Does all this mean that H&M don’t mind selling stuff that don’t meet ’safety requirements’ and ‘chemical restrictions’, but they do mind giving it away to charity? Hmmm. That’ll need clearing up I’m sure. Failing that, if you’re good with a sewing machine, it’s obvious you should get down the arse end of the High Street clothes shops… they’re chucking stuff away which you might be able to do something cool with. If you can be arsed.

[New York Times]

In the final days of 2009, we suggested you keep an eye on high street retailers and note how they reacted to the 1st January VAT increase. We suspected many retailers would absorb the increase themselves and crow about the fact to drum up sales. But would any retailer dare say they were absorbing the price increase for the customer’s benefit when they didn’t reduce them in the first place? They’d probably get away with it too; after all, it’s 14 months since VAT was reduced – nobody would remember whether a high-profile retailer cut their prices in the first place, would they?

Turns out they would, actually.

Initially, high-street fashionmeisters H&M reduced their prices when VAT was cut in December 2008. It didn’t last though, according to a memo faxed to all branches at the time. For the first couple of months, the cost of items was manually reduced when customers paid at the till – an entirely common practise at the time. H&M then decided to stop passing on the discount and continue charging full price:

The full memo is here. In other words, H&M stopped reducing their prices and told customers they could still receive the savings, but only if they spent their money on the promotional offers specified by H&M.

Flash forward to January 2010, and VAT returned to 17.5 per cent. This memo was sent by H&M’s press office this week – you can see the full page here:

Should customers ask about the VAT increase, H&M staff have been told to say that H&M is bearing the cost themselves. The truth of the matter is that it’s the customers who have been bearing the cost on H&M’s behalf since last January. H&M wasn’t the only retailer to stop passing on the VAT savings shortly after they were cut – Homebase did exactly the same thing – and it’s entirely likely the the price of goods would have risen by a similar amount regardless. None of that is the point. The point is that profiteering by telling customers you’re doing them a favour, when in fact you’ve done no such thing, is hardly the right way to go about business.

Bitterwallet smells a catfight a-comin’ – with cheap Jimmy Choo shoes as the star prize.

H&M are lining up the mother of all girl-on-girl showdowns when an affordable collection of the Choo shoes (and other Choo clobber) goes on sale in 16 of their stores at 9am on Saturday November 14^th.

The range will include more than 40 pieces of girl gear including clothing and handbaggage along with the shoes, with most of it available for a knock-down price under £100.

The demand is expected to be phenomenal with Choo fanatics set to queue up all night in a bid to buy some of the items. Keen to avoid an all-out woman war, H&M will be issuing wristbands to the first 160 people in the queue. They will then get ten minutes in the stores’ VIP Choo area in groups of 20 and will be limited to purchasing one item per size.

The participating stores will be London’s Covent Garden; Knightsbridge; Kensington High St; Regent St; Oxford St; Westfield; Brent Cross. Birmingham Bullring; Bluewater; Brighton; Cardiff; Glasgow; Manchester’s Market St & Trafford Centre; Newcastle; Dublin; Dundrum.

eBay will probably be flooded with the stuff by lunchtime on the 14^th.