Posts Tagged ‘health’

New York City sidewalks are crowded enough, but lately they seem even more cramped. No matter how fast you walk, it’s hard not to notice the assorted pieces of furniture that line the edge of the road. Mattresses, couches, tables and chests — visitors to the city might wonder whether these are just remnants of the moving process or free furniture up for grabs. But to those who live here, these discarded possessions only mean one thing: bed bugs.

Able to travel in clothes and luggage as well as multiply from 2 to 120 in just three days, bed bugs are terrible nuisances that are becoming an increasingly larger threat to companies. Not only is New York City now the most-infested city in America (with 11,000 complaints last year!), but it seems that nobody is safe from these creepy-crawlies. The AMC theater in Times Square, a Hollister store, an Abercrombie & Fitch store, a Victoria’s Secret store, Elle magazine’s offices, Time Warner’s offices, Saatchi & Saatchi’s office, the Empire State Building and even, ironically, the New York Health Department have all suffered from an infestation. In fact, Advertising Age reported that if you are a business in New York City, it is almost next to impossible to avoid one.

“I don’t go to the movies anymore, I’m not sitting in those seats, and don’t sit on wooden benches,” said Gale A. Brewer, a member of the City Council, to The New York Times. Brewer even crosses the street when confronted with discarded furniture on the sidewalk.

Along with the pesky business of getting rid of bed bugs, companies are also wary of the strong stigma attached to those infested. As would be expected, many try to avoid making the news at all, opting instead to settle the matter quietly.

Eric Edge, global chief communications officer at the once-infested, now-treated Euro RSCG, recommends that bed bug-ridden companies fess up to the fact quickly. “In today’s age of social media, if you try to cover anything up, or spin or sugarcoat the situation, the public is going to see through it,” he said. He adds that these reactive PR efforts should be coupled with educational information to demonstrate that a business addressing the topic is knowleable about it.

 ”There’s a stigma, but there shouldn’t be,” said Glenn Waldorf, director of Bell Environmental Services, Inc. “It happens everywhere. The stigma should come from companies that do not take proactive action to deal with a situation.”

One of the companies that has publicly taken steps to avoid bed bugs is Bergdorf Goodman, who hired insect-sniffing dogs to investigate their still-uninfected stores, but this strategy has not been adopted by all. “It’s difficult for companies to be proactive because you don’t know when a bug will be carried in,” said Jeffrey White, a research entomologist at BedBugCentral.com. ”It’s really not feasible to be treating an entire movie theater every two weeks.”

Yet, with a bill that has passed the Legislature requiring “owners or lessors to provide bedbug infestation history for the previous year to any lessee of real property within New York city before the lease of such property,” I wonder: should businesses also be legally required to provide this information to its customers, or is “coming clean” just considered a “crisis comms plan” to be done only when absolutely necessary? Now that news has the potential to spread faster than ever before thanks to the Internet, is the collective intelligence (and criticism) of the public making businesses more transparant or less so?