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A customer who expected a tie and pocket square from Banana Republic instead received piles of documents detailing private information about the company's employees, including Social Security numbers, tax forms, resignation letters, legal notices, doctors' notes and performance reviews, the Huffington Post reports.
A Gap employee apparently labeled the packages wrong. Luckily the documents went to someone honest: Emily Dreyfuss, senior front page editor for CNET, and the daughter of actor Richard Dreyfuss, and not someone prone to draining bank accounts.
It's hard to imagine how an envelope full of confidential human resources information, which presumably would be kept in a corporate office, could have gotten mixed up with a tie to be shipped to a customer, presumably from a warehouse. But apparently the company use envelopes that are all the same color and ship from the same mail room.
It's either distressing or amusing that Dreyfuss recently received another wrong package: "an Ivy League univeristy mixed up some letters and sent us the employment records for a new professor. They meant to send my fiancé the final documents about his new post-doctoral position."
In addition, the Banana representative who is helping set things right admitted to Dreyfuss that this isn't the first time such a mixup has happened.
On the bright side, Dreyfuss says: "They are likely also going to comp my fiance's tie." He had been looking for the perfect one for months.
· Banana Republic Accidentally Sends Customer Package Of Confidential Employee Information [HuffPo]
· Emily Dreyfuss on Tumblr [Official Site]