Editor’s note: This article was first published in February 2011 as an opinion piece about a pricing error in Zara’s online store and the Zara People campaign; “a few days ago” refers to the bloggers’ T-shirt plagiarism case of mid-February 2011.
The road to success is hard, because once you get there you’re in the spotlight. Just ask Amancio Ortega, who has an enviable track record and about whom you could find a hundred positive stories in any given week. But no: in the end, the stories that spread most widely online are the ones that don’t speak well of the group.
A few days ago, Inditex took a heavy beating over accusations of plagiarism, following the famous case of the French fashion bloggers’ photos. The accusation may well have been justified, but I’m not sure to what extent it was plagiarism rather than art. Either way, Inditex had to get rid of the shirts and pull them from its stores to stop the viral effect.
Now Inditex is in the news again because of a mistake on its website. For about five minutes, several garments were priced at €1, and given the number of visitors Zara’s online store gets, it didn’t take long to receive a huge number of orders for such a “great deal”.
A few minutes later, the people who had jumped on the offer received a message from the group saying: “we have had to cancel your order, as the price was incorrect due to a computer error“.
A computer glitch isn’t big news, so naturally we can’t pass up the chance to turn it into a “bombshell”. Instead of letting it go, some online newspapers contacted consumer rights associations, hoping to make the story “Zara engages in misleading advertising“. Others simply want Zara to own up to its mistake and honor the price shown at the time of purchase.
The thing is, I’ve never seen this kind of uproar when a bank pays money into someone else’s account by mistake, over such a simple error. It’s saddening that none of the digital newspapers now running this controversy has covered the launch of Zara People, a kind of contest in which the group will pay the people who wear its clothes best and send their photos to the website. That story has been left to second-tier websites and a few personal blogs.
We can clearly see a constant persecution of Inditex, once again forgetting that this chain creates thousands of direct jobs around the world and hundreds of thousands of indirect ones, just as we forget that Inditex is a Spanish company and a global benchmark in fashion. Should we punish and hound it in such a dishonest way?
And, more importantly, shouldn’t we be willing to forgive a mistake, when if one thing has been proven beyond doubt, it’s that we all make mistakes? Let’s not turn into vultures.
Featured image: Luis García, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
_01.jpg){kind=link}