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"  Republished from The Good Men Project, Salon runs an eye-opening (and abs-baring) tell-all with Oliver Bateman, a former Abercrombie &amp;amp; Fitch store manager. It&amp;#039;s a story that encompasses everything you&amp;#039;ve come to expect from the brand, except for the overpowering cologne scent because the Internet isn&amp;#039;t quite that sensory JUST YET. Anyway, here&amp;#039;s how Bateman got his job, for example, at a college job fair: &amp;quot;&amp;#039;You have a bachelor&amp;#039;s degree, right?&amp;#039; [the A&amp;amp;F recruiter asked]. &amp;#039;I double-majored in journalism and history,&amp;#039; I said. &amp;#039;Oh, it doesn&amp;#039;t matter what it&amp;#039;s in. It can be in whatever. It just shows you&amp;#039;re collegiate and quality.&amp;#039; He handed me his card. &amp;#039;Let&amp;#039;s meet at the Southpoint Mall on Monday and we can start you up. You&amp;#039;ll be an assistant manager, but really, you can be anything in this company. Regional manager, VP, whatever ... We&amp;#039;re an amazing company. We hire only amazing people.&amp;#039;&amp;quot; Lo and behold, he was soon managing a store! Magic! Except it wasn&amp;#039;t all glamour and flip-flops: &amp;quot;The job involved impossibly long hours and lots of folding. As fate would have it, I turned out to be a dreadful worker. I cut every corner imaginable, counting down registers that were always fifty dollars short or fifty dollars over, overlooking a staggering amount of employee theft, and sleeping or otherwise screwing around in the back office while the more competent &amp;#039;brand representatives&amp;#039; (i.e., the minimum-wage employees recruited for their looks) closed down the store.&amp;quot; But even those &amp;quot;brand representatives&amp;quot; recruited for their looks came in for criticism: &amp;quot;On Sundays before the store opened, all of the managers would gather on the couches in the store&amp;#039;s central &amp;#039;canoe room&amp;#039; and [among other tasks] we&amp;#039;d grade every single brand representative working in the store on an A-F scale based on his or her appearance. One of the two store managers would read off the names, and the various assistant managers would begin chiming in. &amp;#039;Yeah, the regional manager wants to see less of him,&amp;#039; someone might say. Or, &amp;#039;Hmm, maybe we can recruit better than her but she&amp;#039;s OK for now and doesn&amp;#039;t call off.&amp;#039; Or, &amp;#039;Gawd, he&amp;#039;s hot, but he can&amp;#039;t fold for shit and it&amp;#039;s a shame he&amp;#039;s not straight.&amp;#039;&amp;quot; &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s hot but he can&amp;#039;t fold for shit&amp;quot; is the sort of line I&amp;#039;d love on my resume, mostly for its potential as a fun conversation starter during an interview. But the real-life implications of A&amp;amp;F management&amp;#039;s discrimination is not fun at all. It&amp;#039;s awful, actually: &amp;quot;Our finest worker [was] a tall, chubby, and openly gay African-American who had bright green braces. Although we tried to avoid scheduling him when we knew the [regional manager] was due to visit, chronic labor shortages on account of the company&amp;#039;s low starting wages and obsession with brand representative beauty ensured that he was often working 30+ hours per week. &amp;#039;You have to get that guy off the floor,&amp;#039; he&amp;#039;d tell us. &amp;#039;He&amp;#039;s a fucking disasterpiece.&amp;#039; Store managers always caught hell about him, and finally we removed him from the schedule despite the fact that we had no workers who could replace him.&amp;quot; And Bateman concludes his piece with a blistering condemnation of the brand: &amp;quot;Allow me to recap: there&amp;#039;s this awful, terrible, gross, maleficent company that I and thousands of other foolish young people have worked for. It&amp;#039;s run by some of the nastiest pieces of work in retail. Its reluctant employees, hired because they have college degrees and prepossessing, phenotypically Caucasian/Aryan bodies, are encouraged to join in the fun: ridicule the brand representatives, laugh at fat people, and hate on everybody who isn&amp;#039;t &amp;#039;collegiate&amp;#039; and &amp;#039;quality.&amp;#039;&amp;quot; Read Bateman&amp;#039;s story in full here. RELATED: Confession: What It&amp;#039;s Really Like Working at Abercrombie &amp;amp; Fitch&amp;#039;s Corporate Headquarters Follow Alex on  Twitter. Photo credit: Hannes Magerstaedt / Getty Images "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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