Zara has ordered every employee across its European stores to wear the recalled children's Halloween costume — blue-and-white vertical stripes, faux barbed-wire print, and numbered sleeve patches — for the entire month of October, and to recite a detailed history of Nazi concentration camps to any customer who approaches a rack.
The Spanish fashion chain, which withdrew the costume after critics noted its resemblance to prisoner uniforms, announced that the recall would be replaced by a mandatory educational performance. Each staff member must now complete a forty-hour training course on the Holocaust and deliver a spoken lecture before completing any sale. «We realized that simply removing the product was insufficient,» said a Zara regional director in Madrid. «Now every customer will understand exactly why the costume was wrong, whether they ask or not.»
Shoppers in Barcelona reported being followed through the aisles by employees in striped uniforms who recited the dates of the Wannsee Conference and the names of extermination camps while folding sweaters. «I only wanted a scarf,» said one customer, «but I received a forty-minute seminar on the Final Solution.»
The company has also installed turnstiles at store entrances that count each visitor and trigger a loudspeaker announcement of the total number of Holocaust victims every time the tally reaches a multiple of one hundred. Zara's parent company, Inditex, confirmed that the program will expand to all 1,800 stores worldwide by November, and that employees who fail to memorize the lecture will be required to attend a second training session on their days off.