By Julie Shapiro
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
LOWER MANHATTAN — Lydia Morrison picked the wrong time to start shopping at Hollister.
Shortly after Morrison, 24, bought beach clothes at Hollister’s SoHo location several weeks ago, she learned that the store was infested with bedbugs.
“It was a very stressful day when I heard,” said Morrison, who lives in NoHo. “I really, really did not want to have them…. I know it’s absolutely horrific.”
Morrison did not see any bugs on her newly purchased skirt and dresses, and she had not gotten any bites, but she called an exterminator just to be safe.
For $250, M&M Environmental led a bug-sniffing dog through Morrison’s apartment last week and declared that she was bedbug-free.
Morrison said she was so relieved that she did not mind paying for the service, but if she had actually had bedbugs, she would have sought reimbursement from Abercrombie & Fitch, Hollister’s parent company.
M&M Environmental has received more than 150 calls from concerned shoppers like Morrison since word spread that Hollister and the South Street Seaport Abercrombie had bedbugs.
“For the most part, everyone is fine,” said Timothy Wong, M&M’s technical director.
While Wong has discovered a handful of bedbug cases, he said he could not tell whether the critters came from Abercrombie or somewhere else.
Hollister reopened last Saturday, three days after it closed, and Abercrombie expects to reopen its Seaport store on Thursday or Friday, employees told DNAinfo.
Abercrombie hired the company Moving Right Along to decontaminate the clothing at both stores by bathing it in a colorless, odorless gas that kills the bugs.
“After 24 hours, it does its trick and everything’s fine,” said Jim Rueda, CEO of Moving Right Along. “Without a doubt, you wouldn’t know the difference at all.”
Wong, who provided decontamination suits to Rueda’s workers, said getting the bugs out of the clothes is the easy part — cleaning the store itself is much harder, and he was surprised to see the shops reopening so soon.
A source familiar with the stores said the infestation may have been going on for as long as several months. Employees reported the problem first, but the store’s leaders did not take action until customers started noticing the bugs, the source said.
The Seaport and SoHo stores share inventory and some employees go back and forth, so that is probably how the bugs spread, the source said.
Abercrombie’s corporate office did not respond to a request for comment.
Wong recommends that shoppers put all newly purchased clothes in the dryer on high heat for 20 minutes as a precaution.
“It’s becoming a problem now and people have to realize it,” Wong said. “You have to be proactive.”
