Abercrombie & Fitch has agreed to end its use of “on-call” scheduling, which forces workers to put their lives on hold and come into work on short notice. Banning this practice would be a good thing for a presidential candidate to promise, and then do.

The news today that ab-sessed teen retailer Abercrombie & Fitch offered to pay Jersey Shore instigator Mike "The Situation" Sorrentino to not wear its clothes in public has lit up the internet. Let's see just what is making the store so upset.

Our photo of an Abercrombie manager's strident "styling" note in a break room brought forth a flood of reminiscences from commenters familiar with Abercrombie's hotties-only hiring policies. Our favorite, though, was this email from a regretful former Hollister manager.

We've written a lot lately on American Apparel's disturbing beauty-based hiring policy. Let us acknowledge: other retailers are similarly inclined. Take Abercrombie & Fitch, for example.

The noble American mall has been killed by the recession. Already dead! So is there a trend piece to be written, still? Yes. Can we sum it up in one sentence? Yes we can:

The magalogue: It's back! The combo magazine/ catalogue bastardization never really went away [IHT/ Agenda Inc.], but Abercrombie is relaunching its version, A&F Quarterly, which was originally much appreciated, mostly, by horny teenage girls. The preppy retailer dropped the fake magazine several years ago because of the public outcry over the pictures. Abercrombie still loves unhealthily sexy advertising, but the cover of this year's AFQ (pictured) looks pretty straightforward. But after the jump, a few images from the riskier A&F Quarterlies of old. It's all a matter of taste (in butts).

Just two days after citing an Abercrombie store in Virginia Beach for obscenity for their sexy ads, police have dropped the charges. "Police confiscated the ads Saturday, saying they violated the city's obscenity law because some of the models were partially nude. One showed a group of shirtless male models and one has his jeans low enough to show a part of his buttocks... Virginia Beach city code says obscene material must be harmful to juveniles in order to be illegal, and [police chief] Cevera said the display ads 'did not quite rise to that level.'" [WVEC.com]

In this week's Thursday Styles, Alex Kuczynski takes her multimillions and goes shopping at the new Abercrombie & Fitch flagship store on Fifth Avenue. She doesn't much care for it — of course, being 37 years old, she's not supposed to care for it — and she fixates mostly on the fact she found the store too damned loud. But she also took a moment to turn her nose up at the store's famously oversexed shtick: