People pay good money for this sort of thing if it’s properly delivered:

ass fudge on sale!

Perhaps we’re looking at a retail service environment where all the employees in the shelf-price-tagging process are so illiterate they couldn’t notice this, or so alienated they just didn’t give a crap. (Uh, er.) Tesco’s a bit outside my service area, I got no idea. Another possibility is that the “shelf-price-tagging-process” has been entirely automated — the database-to-shelf-sticker algorithm says “assorted fudge” must become “ass fudge” and nobody outside the central office has the authority or the ability to make it print a different sticker. Possibly nobody sees the sticker after it comes out of the printer except for the lowest-level employee (in the U.S., I’d say “minimum-wage part-timer”) who slaps the sticker on the shelves, and functional illiteracy there (again, in the U.S. anyway) is a very real possibility. (By functional illiteracy I mean the kind of reading ability where you can read stuff if you stare at it and think, but you retain the capability of having words in your visual field that you have not automatically read the instant you saw them. You’ve got the capacity to not read stuff you see, and you exercise that capacity every chance you get.)

Whatever tasty stew of those factors delivered ass fudge to the Tesco shelves, it’s hard to view this as anything but a megacorp retailer reaping one of the “rewards” of having squeezed so much of the cost out of the retail grocery process that the process begins to degrade in important and embarrassing ways.

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