Hollister – where I get a lot of my clothes when I’m out in Dallas visiting the folks, and recently arrived in this country, which I was a bit disappointed about. Anyways, seeing as I was in London over Christmas, I decided to head out to Westfield and go and check out one of two Hollister stores currently open in the UK (another one is due to open soon at Bluewater in Kent).

It was nightmare – and that’s putting it politely. The photo above is actually Hollister from the outside, with a queue of people that passed the Nike Store next door, waiting to get in. Now that’s fair enough I guess, it’s not their fault if the store is so crowded people have to queue.

Yet not only was the store ridiculously packed on the inside, the service was unbelievably atrocious. After I’d battled to get to the back of the store to check out shirts, I stood at the changing rooms for five minutes before asking someone whether they were open. No, those rooms were not open. So I headed across to the other side fo the changing rooms, where as I waited for twenty minutes to try some stuff on, the queue behind me grew to 14 people.

There were three members of staff looking after three changing cubicles in that area, so why didn’t they just open up the other changing room area as well?

I decided I’d take the shirts, and went to queue to pay. It’s a sign of how mobbed the shop was that by the time I got to the end of the queue, I’d set off the alarms at the exit to the shop with the shirts I was trying to pay for. On my way up the queue, I counted how many people were in it. 37. Thirty seven!

This rather blurred photo doesn’t really do the queue justice. But the queue goes further than the bright light at the back of the photo.

All in all, I walked straight in and picked two shirts up, tried them on and paid for them. That took me over an hour.

Now Hollister can probably get away with this, and their higher prices which is what drives me insane. They must have raked the money in that day, so what incentive is there for them to improve their service?

The only upside to the whole experience was the unbelievably hot girl serving behind the counter.