Lingerie Customer Was No Lady
Would you wear a short red tutu over thigh-high sheer nylons and tennies to go shopping downtown? A Robinson’s patron showed up there the other day in something a lot like that.
“I thought, ‘Now I’ve seen it all,’ ” a lingerie saleswoman said of the man, who attempted in vain to enter the department’s dressing rooms to try on a bra. “We told him to go downstairs to the men’s department if he wanted to try it on.” Instead, he purchased the bra on the spot.
Had this customer called ahead to ask if he could come in to try on this or that, as men do about twice a month, the saleswoman says, he would have been politely told of the store’s policy.
However, courtesy has its limits. When one particularly persistent male caller, apparently hung up on getting an exact description of an undergarment, asked too many questions--how sheer? what would show?--he got hung up on.
* ALL THAT GLITTERS: The notion of practical jewelry has reached new heights in the university town of Lafayette, Ind., where Cheri McKenzie turns packaged condoms into earrings, brooches and other fashion accessories.
“I feel like if we can make the condoms fun, it will relieve the embarrassment in buying them . . . and they’re still usable,” said McKenzie, who works in a Planned Parenthood office that sells thousands of condoms to Purdue University students.
Her most popular and lightest earrings, priced at $4 a pair, are made from prophylactics in a gold plastic wrapper.
* THE JEANS TEAM: Levi Strauss & Co. of San Francisco is converting its domestic sewing factories to a new, team-based production system to reduce the time it takes to make a pair of jeans.
The world’s largest clothing manufacturer has introduced the alternative in five U.S. plants and plans to implement it in the rest of its 27 domestic factories by 1994, the Associated Press reports.
The team-based system, begun by Japanese auto makers and imitated by many U.S. companies, aims to increase job productivity and reduce fatigue by organizing workers into groups in which each performs more than one task.
Under the old system, it took 11 days for a piece of denim to become a pair of jeans. Under the new system, production time has been cut to seven days.
But wages may be lower under the new approach. Workers under the old system earned an hourly wage and a bonus depending on output, with pay ranging from $4.50 to $12.50 an hour, says a spokesman.
Now each worker receives hourly pay of $6.75 plus $1 if the team meets a daily quota. A bonus is paid if a team exceeds the quota, but that seldom happens, he said.
* SANTA STICKUP: The year has been larded with felonies in which the criminals have dressed up as pop culture figures--especially Batman. Now it’s Santa’s turn. On Monday, in Oslo, Norway, two men dressed as Santa Claus stormed into an Italian restaurant and took about $14,800. The Norwegian national news agency NTB said the raiders, who spoke with foreign accents, escaped in a stolen car.
Maybe St. Nick needed help meeting the elves’ payroll.
* STRIPPING FOR VOTES: In an election in Taiwan’s industrial city of Kaohsiung, a spectacular political feud is being waged between Hsu Shao-tan, a former stripper, and Wu Der-mei, the island’s richest businesswomen.
Hsu was involved in a fistfight with some of Wu’s aides at an election office, Reuters reports. She has also accused Wu of hiring gangsters to beat up one of her campaign aides and of releasing a fake videotape that appears to show Hsu performing in a pornographic film.
At a recent campaign rally attended by several thousand people, Hsu bared her breasts to demonstrate that the body shown in the pornographic film was not hers. Not surprisingly, this drew the biggest crowd seen at a Kaohsiung election rally so far this year.
