Splitting Threads.(The Talk of the Town)(April White's fraud case vs. Bed, Bath & Beyond)

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"); ...