First World Shop Problems

Shop owners are usually worrying about light-fingered customers making off with their goods. But for one independent craft shop in East London, the real scourge is patrons with “excessively greasy hands”.

It's Hackney, so why are people's hands greasy?  Fried chicken? 

Fabrications has been trading on Broadway Market in Hackney for over 25 years, specialising in handmade, one-of-a-kind garments, sustainable fabrics and woven blankets. Its next door neighbour is the luxe cosmetics brand Aesop, whose distinctive amber bottles haunt the bathrooms of Millennial creatives and small plates restaurants across the city.Anyone who passes Aesop can try their £80 Resurrection hand balm for free – bottles of the woody, citrus-scented lotion are fixed in a bracket “strategically placed at the front door"

Oh, I see. 

While this is designed to tempt customers into the store, it is having a “major, accumulative, detrimental impact on our business”, according to Fabrications owner Barley Massey.In a sign posted in the shop window, Massey bemoaned the “free and unsupervised” use of the “aromatique and greasy” lotion. “Passers-by have been taking excessive amounts of this balm which is impossible to absorb into their hands,” Massey wrote. “We regularly witness people rubbing the excess cream on their arms, legs and even other people’s hands, faces, arms and legs”.

How revolting! But I guess that's Hackney for you. 

This meant that customers who then came into Fabrications were leaving unwanted smells and stains on their materials, causing “unnecessary stress” to staff. Fabrications were even losing business from “having to prevent customers with excessively greasy hands from entering the shop”.

Frankly, they sound like the sort of low-impulse-control customers you wouldn't want in your shop, so it could be argued that Aesop's doing you a favour by allowing them to mark themselves as such... 

According to Fabrications, Aesop has shown “no regard or interest to the problem”. The local MP, Meg Hillier, has even become involved, and Aesop was asked by Hackney Council to remove the sample bottles. Aesop did not immediately respond to The Standard’s request for comment.

Her requests have so far been brushed off, though at one point a manager did get in touch with a peace offering: some free Aesop hand sanitiser.

*chuckles* Well played, Aesop, well played...