With the holiday season rapidly approaching, parent company URBN (also encompassing the Free People and Anthropologie brands) sent out an e-mail to its employees asking them to volunteer at the organization’s Gap, Pennsylvania fulfillment center for no less than five weekend days in October, which the firm claims will be its busiest pre-holiday month.
The appointed, if somewhat alliterative, tasks: to “pick, pack, and prepare packages for shipment” in order to ensure timely delivery of holiday orders for customers over the holiday season. The request was billed as a “team-building” activity and a way for employees to “experience our fulfillment operations first hand.”
Oh, and lunch will be served on all five weekend days. A hyperlink in the e-mail where employees were encouraged to sign up now indicates that no additional responses for volunteers are being accepted. URBN published an update after distributing the invitation indicating it had elicited a “tremendous response.”
Of course, retail industry watchers will recall some controversial apparel offered at Urban Outfitters in the past, including a blood-stained Kent State sweatshirt (where several students were notoriously shot dead by National Guard officers in 1970) and a tapestry that reminded many customers of the Holocaust.