My Surmise

Back in December, a group of activists began protesting Kmart's sale of a shirt (pictured above) that they felt promoted domestic violence. Initially, Kmart stated that, "We respect the opinions of our customers, however, we believe these attitude Ts are meant to be light-hearted in nature." Roughly translated: We're not taking it down, get a life. On January 22, Kmart changed their minds, releasing a statement that "We've heard and respect the opinions of our customers and the item is no longer available at Kmart. And we have no plans to reorder it." After hearing that they promised to remove the shirt, I was all too much reminded of the Wal-Mart skull t-shirt fiasco, where they promised to remove an offensive t-shirt but failed to do so for well over a month. I took a trip to Kmart to verify that they have removed the shirt and to my surprise they had! Props to Kmart for taking a lesson from Wal-Mart's mistake. T-shirt image © 2006 Blethen Maine Newspapers and therefore not released under a creative commons license.

Labels: Kmart, Offensive T-Shirts

Read more »

Labels: Advertisements, TiVo

When I finished watching this weeks episode of Scrubs, I was prompted by a rather annoying TiVo message. "Are you done with this program?" But this was not the regular TiVo deletion prompt. I am usually given two options, "Delete now" or "Keep this recording", this time I was given a third, "Get your BK Xbox games today!" followed by the Burger King logo. The regular TiVo ads do not bother me. These usually consist of a small message at the bottom of my "TiVo Central". This is because they small and unobtrusive. These new ads are rather large and annoying. Although not quite as intrusive, it reminds me very much of TiVo's attempted fast forward ads back in 2005. I would like to point out that I currently own a combo TiVo/DVD player which provides me with free "TiVo Basic" service. So it is possible that these ads are only being shown on the free service. If I were forking over $20 per month to TiVo, I would certainly be far more angry, but none the less, I am not happy. Picture and text released under a CC BY-NC License Update: An anonymous commenter confirms that these ads are being served for paying users as well.

Labels: Advertisements, TiVo

With my last post I promised to end my coverage of the Nazi skull shirt on sale at Wal-Mart, well I lied. I visited Wal-Mart on 1/3/07 and found two of these shirts on the shelves. Although you cannot buy them, Wal-Mart promised to remove them from the shelves 56 days ago. At this point, I have run out of any insightful or interesting comments to this fiasco.

Labels: Offensive T-Shirts, Skull T-Shirt, Wal-Mart