A major retailer sparked backlash for creating a false sense of urgency after a photo of an in-store advertisement began circulating online.
In the subreddit r/Anticonsumption, a Redditor shared how fast-fashion brand H&M painted the following words in large letters on a wall: "Grab it now, tomorrow it might be gone forever!"
Below the ad was a rack of hanging shirts that appeared to be on sale.
"This feels so messed up and creepy," one Redditor wrote in response to the post. "... It's such a gross lie, just to encourage people to make a purchase if they were on the fence."
"Tomorrow it might be gone forever cut up and thrown in a landfill to create an illusion of scarcity at the expense of wasting resources and harming our planet," another Redditor said.
This isn't the first time the retailer has been called out for its business practices. According to a 2021 report by Fast Company, H&M is one of the fast-fashion industry's "biggest polluters," with the value of its unsold clothes in 2019 exceeding $4 billion.
The company has stated its intention to reduce pollution, including by working with suppliers that don't use coal — a type of dirty energy — and by protecting tropical forests.
However, an investigation by Quartz published in 2022 called out the retailer for greenwashing, writing that "in the most egregious cases, H&M showed data that were the exact opposite of reality."
A lot of shoppers have turned to thrifting to score cheap deals and reduce the amount of waste that ends up in landfills, as more than 100 million tons of textiles are thrown in the trash each year.
"The sad part is that those clothes are pretty basic-looking. Even if they were gone tomorrow, you could easily get a nearly identical piece of clothing from another store," another commenter observed.
"Unfortunately, the chemicals in cheaply-made clothes won't be gone for hundreds of years at least," someone else said, alluding to how many fast-fashion items are made with synthetic materials that contaminate the environment when they break down.
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