It’s Tasty And Delicious
People pay good money for this sort of thing if it’s properly delivered:
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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More than illiteracy, I’d think it’s that part time minimum wage employees of the large chains aren’t treated in a way that inspires loyalty, and reporting a tag to your manager because you think it might scare off/offend customers and hurt profits is an act of loyalty. As someone who has in the past worked such jobs, I’d be much more likely to notice the tag, and have a chuckle at my employer’s stupidity than to go find a manager and suck up.
I remember employees trying to be as outrageous and provocative as possible without stepping over the line that would get unwelcome management attention. I remember an employee, sadly not me, who managed to get an announcement on the intercom to drum up sales for underbed rollaway storage chests for christmas trees that went something like ‘Attention Mallwart shoppers: Are you looking for a new place to stick your christmas tree? Are you tired of bending over?’
As someone who’s been living in the UK for a month for work, Tesco is a lot like some grocery stores in the states: poorly or at best only decently managed, with low-paid workers and policies that discourage long-term initiative or enthusiasm. The cashier I had this morning was the result of these policies, full of this aura of barely repressed exasperation. (Admittedly, the fact that I had trouble figuring out which line I should be in probably didn’t help.) So Collarsmith’s comment seems right on – if illiteracy isn’t the problem, the employment policy and daft customers like me certainly are. Why care about a typo if there’s no incentive to change it save an expected but unrewarded love for a company?
I have been served in Tesco by a young lady wearing a large badge depicting Nelson from The Simpsons. Nelson was pointing at the viewer and <Ha Ha!).
Laughing at the term ‘ass fudge’ would cause puzzlment in the UK. There an ass is grey, brays, eats carrots and has long ears, whereas you sit on your arse and fudge, when it isn’t a sugary sweet, is nonsense or an ineffective political compromise, not shit.
Oh, I wouldn’t say it would cause puzzlement. I’m from the UK (Wales, in fact) and would definitely snigger to myself about Welsh lady ass fudge if I saw this. I love how specific it seems.
Fudge is brown and squidgy. Brits like their toilet humour, and American culture has seeped into our consciousness enough that we instantly recognise that when you say ass you really mean arse. ;)
Not that you would catch me in evil giant monopoly Tesco, of course. They were pretty much the only horse in the race until Walmart bought Asda. I’m sure you can imagine how that has improved matters…
over at this site they have the same shot followed up with Mitt Romney getting ready to help himself to a big helping.
http://www.hotu...69583
No one does arrogance like Bacchus.
Saw an item with the code BUTFLOS on the sticker. It was Butler Tooth Floss.
Just in case you cared, what it’s actually selling is Welsh Lady assorted fudge. Pity ‘assorted’ is too long for the label and had to be abbreviated!
That was in the post, Captain Obvious. ;-)