Our photo of an Abercrombie manager's strident "styling" note in a break room brought forth a flood of reminiscences from commenters familiar with Abercrombie's hotties-only hiring policies. Our favorite, though, was this email from a regretful former Hollister manager.

Regrettably, I was a manager at a Hollister (Abercrombie's kid sister store) a couple years ago. We held constant meetings to review how attractive our kids were. The district managers were obsessed with hiring kids that teenagers wanted to emulate; that were "aspirational"... I got in trouble for correcting my manager when I told him that aspirational means to have aspirations, and what he really meant was inspirational.

We managers were reminded daily to hire 9's and 10's. We got called out on conference calls for putting a '7' in the front room. We were sent DVD's monthly reminding us of the Hollister/Abercrombie look, the "whole package". We were told that we weren't following the vision if we weren't hiring the hottest kids in the mall. More store hours were spent recruiting hotties than actually training people to work. The better looking the "model" that we hired, the less work they would actually have to do.

It was unreal.

[Today in people who don't care about this issue: Salon's Mary Elizabeth Williams. Our perma-response is here.]