Issue:Pants that don't last
Anger Factor (out of 10): 4
Mission: Get the Gap to toughen up their pants
Mission Difficulty (out of 10): 6
For Bonus Marks: Appear in a Gap commercial doing a cute little bum-shake dance
Status: Ongoing Phase I - Letter to the President
On February 11, 2004, the following letter was sent to Mr. Paul Pressler, President and CEO of the Gap in an attempt to resolve this issue quickly. -----------------------------------------
Mr. Paul Pressler
President and CEO Gap Inc
2 Folsom St., San Francisco CA 94105
(650) 952-4400 Dear Mr. Pressler, GAP makes some great looking jeans. They fit well, they're comfortable and they even make my skinny white-guy butt look half decent. But they don't last very long. I like the Worker model. But I work in an office, and after a few casual Fridays the pockets and cuffs are already fraying and the seams are coming loose. Exposed to real work, I suspect the poor Worker Jeans would be in tatters before the whistle blew for lunch. I bought a pair of jeans at Marks Work Warehouse a few years ago that after serious household and garden chores are showing hardly any wear and tear at all. Which means of course that I'm stuck with these hideously unattractive pants till the end of time. The Last Angry Young Man is a web-based organization (www.angryman.ca) dedicated to using anger in productive ways. We identify maddening issues, assign them an anger value and set measurable goals against which we can measure the productivity of our actions. In this case, the falling-apart pants were assigned an anger value of 4 (out of 10). A free pair of 32x32 worker jeans would be considered a partial success. To consider the mission a full success, I would need to receive the free jeans and a commitment from you that someone will look into toughening-up GAP jeans. And in order to score this mission as an overwhelming success, I would need to appear in a GAP commercial doing a little booty-shake dance. I'm convinced we can work together to produce a happy customer, a happy company and a tougher pair of pants. Everything else about the GAP rocks. I'm Adam Scott, the last angry young man.
----------------------------------------------- Phase I Response
I received this response from Amy in corporate communications. Not particularly helpful, but just barely enough detail to indicate that she read my letter. Not a single mention of getting me in a GAP commercial. I'm thinking maybe this multi-national corporation isn't as fun-loving as it appears to be on TV. The bottom line is that these pants pretty much fell to pieces within weeks. Call me crazy, but GAP didn't have these kinds of production problems when their clothes were being hand-stitched by dedicated little child labourers in Bangladesh. Phase II Response - SUCCESS!
Unbelievable, but true. On Amy's recommendation, I finally took the offending jeans into a GAP store for managerial review. This was months, or maybe even a full year, after purchase (the Angryman doesn't get out much) with no hope of finding the receipt. I spoke with the manager, explained my instructions from Amy, presented the jeans in question and recieved a brand-spanking-new pair of pants! Pant quality may continue to suck, but the GAP replaces all products that suck free of charge. So the GAP isn't as fun as they seem on TV, and I'll probably never get to do a bum-shake dance in one of their ads, but they do stand behind their products to a certain extent, just like Amy said. God bless you Amy Spencer, you are the Queen of GAP corporate communications.