Who, speaking last week, made the following statement: “Enough is enough. More people need to be willing to step up and say, ‘Let’s do something about this.’ That’s how change will get made”?
(a) Senator Hillary Clinton
(b) Senator Barack Obama
(c) April White, a massage therapist from Clermont, Florida, who filed a class-action lawsuit against Bed Bath & Beyond and its manufacturing partner, Synergy, Inc., seeking “to redress defendants’ numerous deceptive acts and unconscionable business practices designed to mislead the public into believing that their bedding and linen products are of a higher thread count and, therefore, higher quality, than they really are.”
The answer is (c), April White. On or about February 10, 2003, at a Bed Bath & Beyond in Birmingham, Alabama, White purchased one queen flat sheet, one queen fitted sheet, and two pillowcases: white, pre-shrunk, extra deep, one hundred per cent chemical-free, “woven with durable two-ply yarns,” the packaging said, for a grand total of eight hundred threads. White had had her first experience with high-thread-count sheets a few months earlier, at a Ritz-Carlton in California. “They were so light and so soft,” she recalled, over the telephone. “They almost felt like skin.” Their sumptuousness moved White to consider upgrading the linens on her massage tables. “I don’t normally invest in pricey sheets for myself,” she said, “but I decided, if I was going to use them for my clients, that I needed to test them out at home, for bragging rights.”
Massage therapists buy a lot of linens—White estimates that she owns twenty or thirty sets. Upon washing her new sheets, she was immediately disappointed. She said, “They just didn’t feel like I expected luxurious sheets to feel.” A lawyer friend encouraged her to have the bedding tested, so White sent them off to a lab that specializes in textile forensics. The verdict: her new “800 Natural” sheets were, in fact, mere 408s.
Thread count refers to the number of threads in a square inch of fabric. The calculation is customarily made by multiplying the vertical yarns (“ends”) by the horizontal yarns (“picks”); this is the method endorsed by the Federal Trade Commission and enforced, traditionally, by gentleman’s agreement. In recent years, some manufacturers have been using multi-ply yarns—made from two or more strands of fibre twisted together—to juice their stats, so that a dust ruffle woven from two hundred two-ply yarns could technically be said to have a thread count of four hundred. As a fuzzy-accounting offense, this seems less akin to the subprime mortgage crisis than to the Tasti D-Lite calorie-deflation scandal of 2002. TheFabricOfOurLives.com, Cotton Inc.’s Web site, notes, “It’s not a lie, but not exactly textbook accurate, either.”
To White, Bed Bath & Beyond—whose own Web site uses the orthodox definition—is a dry-goods Enron. “They’re preying on people by getting them to buy products for a higher price than they’re really worth,” Edith M. Kallas, White’s lawyer, said. “Companies should not be able to get away with that!”
The lawsuit, which is being adjudicated in New Jersey district court, was filed as a class-action case whose members, Kallas estimates, could number in the tens of thousands. Bed Bath & Beyond denies any wrongdoing, but last month the parties reached a provisional settlement. If approved by the judge, it will provide for the plaintiffs—“all purchasers between August 1, 2000 and November 9, 2007 of multi-ply sheet sets, pillowcases, down comforters, bedskirts, shams, duvets, and down pillows from Bed Bath & Beyond that were labeled as ‘plied,’ ‘two-ply,’ or ‘2-ply’ ”—a series of refunds and discount certificates. White, as the class representative, stands to receive twenty-five hundred dollars. (Bed Bath & Beyond will pay her lawyers up to two hundred and ninety thousand dollars.) White says she is proud to have taken a stand against scratchy linens: “Was I going to do something to benefit people at large, or just continue to do small things that only benefit me?” Her mother-in-law recently gave her some new sheets with a thread count of six hundred. The others are crumpled up in the bottom of her laundry hamper. ♦