Okay, here’s a story
that comes out of the UK—one of those corporate head scratchers that every once
in a while just leaves me completely gobsmacked.
It seems Asda, the
supermarket chain that’s a wholly-owned subsidiary of Walmart, had listed this Halloween
costume on its online catalog:
Do you notice what’s
wrong with it? Because if you do, you’re presumably way ahead of everyone in
Asda’s corporate merchandising and marketing departments. Not to mention
whoever in legal and PR signed off on it.
I mean, really—was there
no one in the chain of approvals who held up a hand, cleared their throat and
said, “Um, hello…”?
Because pretty much
most of the denizens of the platform dropped Asda in it in short order. On
Wednesday the company was forced to apologize, remove the costume from its
catalog and offer up a donation of £25,000 to the mental health charity Mind. (Asda
competitor Tesco, which had a similar costume on offer, recalled its version
and announced it would contribute some unspecified sum to Mind as well.)
I find it interesting
that these companies are so out of it that it apparently didn’t occur to them that
1)Mental illness isn’t a particularly joking matter in general, much less after
recent events in the Washington Navy Yard; or that 2) Social media is going to
pick up on anything and ram it down
your corporate throat.
Look, I’m
not the most politically correct human being on the face of the planet, and I
acknowledge that this is Halloween we’re talking about, which is not the most
tasteful holiday in the calendar. If Asda and Tesco had wanted to sell this
particular costume, all they had to do was label it “ax murderer”, and they’d
have been home free. You can’t really declare ax murderers a sensitive category; if it weren’t for them, Jamie Lee Curtis wouldn’t have had the career
that allows her out there hawking Activia these days. (A horror of a different
stripe.)
But—seriously,
people? “Mental patient”? I’d ask, what were they thinking; but clearly they
weren’t.
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