If you were a clothing designer, and you were making T-shirts for sale at WalMart, and somebody said “How about a shirt with a skull? Maybe something kind of crude and retro-looking?” You might google around for royalty-free skull images and come up with the one I have here, and a few months later the shirt you made with it would be sold in all of WalMart’s stores. Pretty cool, eh?
As it turns out, no.
As blogger Bent Corner explains, that’s the emblem for the Totenkopf Division of Hitler’s Waffen-SS, just like the guards at Aushwitz used to wear.
Of course, WalMart immediately removed the shirts from all stores.
Or so you’d think, yet they’re still turning up in WalMart stores three months later:
“Everyone agreed that these shirts have to go, including Wal-Mart; it’s just that they didn’t do anything about it,” [Rep. Jan] Schakowsky [from Illinois] said. “Either at the time they really weren’t serious, or their capacity to do that is limited, which makes one wonder about recalls of potentially dangerous products.”
Blogger Rick Rottman of BentCorner.com was first to recognize the T-shirt’s skull-and-crossbones design as the infamous Nazi emblem, and posted his discovery online in November. At the time, Wal-Mart responded quickly to the public outcry, promising to ban the sale of the shirts and remove them from stores.
Despite the corporate order, it appears the shirts were never removed from at least three dozen of Wal-Mart’s 3,300 U.S. stores, according to Consumerist.com, which has been tracking discoveries of the shirts.
I could understand it taking three days to make sure everyone gets the memo, and I could even understand it taking three weeks to be sure that every single store has removed the shirts from the sale racks (memos get lost, employees quit and leave things undone), but three months?
I want to buy one of those shirts.