I'm still going there, because honestly, as what's called a retail environment, they do an awesome job. I feel 10 years younger and 5 times more fabulous just walking into the place. The only problem is that I have to spend so much time looking that I never have time to try anything on. Mostly because the changing rooms need a LOT of work. Even if there's a room open, the attendant just keeps futzing around, completely ignoring a huge line of people because apparently, the rejected items urgently need to be organized on the rack Just So. And the line at the register is notoriously ridiculous. The clothes are probably priced as low as they are due to the fact that the company refuses to hire more than 3 cashiers per store. I've actually gone in, shopped at blinding speed and made a quick decision and approached the line, only to turn around and put everything down and leave because there were about 20 people ahead of me in line.
That said, it seems like H&M thinks it has such a captive audience that's it's OK for their website to really, really blow. I went to Google and typed in "Hennes & Mauritz Women's Clothing" and the store's official site was nowhere in the top rankings. The first site was the Wikipedia entry. Luckily, that had a large H&M ad in the right column, so I clicked on that only to feel like a complete loser when I was told that I couldn't go to the site because I didn't have Flash 8. Fortunately for us non-starbellied Sneetches, there was an HTML site so I valiantly surfed on. The next step was a brief form asking what country I wanted to look in and which gender clothing I was interested in. Fair enough, I'm an American Female. Next page, Which state did I live in? Normally a state of free floating anxiety, but I clicked on Massachusetts. NEXT PAGE, what city? Okay, now I'm on my 7th page and I haven't seen a single stitch of clothing yet. BOSTON! Finally, a page loads. It's a short, boring blurb about H&M's retail philosophy and a list of press releases and the nav contains links to contacting them, reading about them and working for them. Alright marketing geniuses, can you guess what the number one reason is that the average user would want to come to your clothing site? Here's a hint, it's not to read about your new store opening up in San Paulo. There was not a single link to check out what the store sells! I understand if the company wants save money by not hiring photographers, and models and all that but didn't they just get Madonna to do a huge ad campaign? Even Target has on-line retailing.
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