This is from today's editon of ShelfAwareness:
Duh.
According to the Times of London, Woolworths "has withdrawn bedroom furniture for young girls bearing the sexually charged name Lolita after a campaign waged by a mothers' online chat room." A product called the Lolita Midsleeper Combi--and general ignorance on the part of the retailer--caused the controversy. "Whereas many mothers were familiar with Vladimir Nabokov and his famous novel, it seems that the Woolworths staff were not. At first they were baffled by the fuss. A spokesman for the company told the Times: 'What seems to have happened is the staff who run the website had never heard of Lolita, and to be honest no one else here had either. We had to look it up on Wikipedia. But we certainly know who she is now.'"Image from BN.com
3 comments:
Oh please. Big chains feigning ignorance makes me crazy. SOMEBODY...ANYBODY had to know...but the "tell don't tell and let's see how stupid our customer base is"...they just got caught with their pants down.
good post.
I don't know what's worse, the fact that they did this altogether, or that they thought being stupid would be a better excuse than being negligent. I weep for the future.
Somewhere, the person who suggested this name is giggling at how stupid they were to accept the name and put it on a girl's bedroom set!
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