Rumored Closings Ruining Retailers
I remember the e-mail well. My mother-in-law – God bless her – is good for forwarding a few e-mail chain letters my way daily. This one during the Christmas season alerted the readers that a bunch of retailers were going to go out of business immediately after Christmas, and that you shouldn’t buy gift cards from any of them.
My initial reaction was that Talbots, one of the merchants on the list, was not going out of business. We’d written enough about their woes that I knew it was a hoax. But this USA Today article shows that other recipients (like my mother-in-law) were gullible.
Some irresponsible bloggers ran with the story. And worse, some mainstream media outlets like Forbes.com looked into and wrote articles about some of the allegedly troubled merchants, such as PacSun and Zales.
New media is definitely a part of the problem. Not all new media, but definitely the ones who doesn’t understand the 5Ws of journalism, or libel and slander laws. And those are the ones who are making legitimate bloggers seem more like Chicken Little.
Anyone who was dumb enough to respond to that “retail is collapsing” e-mail probably also warned all their friends – last month – that the Y2K bug was about to arrive.
