A Black President? Muhammad Ali’s comments…

Too Pretty For Homework

On August 31st at 5am, I saw something in my G+ stream that I decided to take action on. A shirt that was being sold online by JC Penny had been mentioned by one of the people I have circled. The shirt read, “I’m too pretty to do homework, so my brother has to do it for me”. Obviously, the message that the shirt is sending has a big problem… I won’t get into that, here.

Rather than re-posting what Anna had written, or writing anything about it on my own, I immediately went to the JC Penny website and looked for their contact information. I called a toll-free number and was talking to a customer service person rather quickly (it was 5 in the morning, so I really didn’t have to hold, at all).

I told her that I was calling about the shirt. She had me describe the shirt to her. I could tell that she was looking it up, writing stuff down, or something. I explained to her that I “personally” didn’t have a problem with them selling the shirt. I also explained how I found the shirt, though, and was concerned that this could spread into a PR nightmare (I referred to it as a “shitstorm”) for them, once this started spreading out to Twitter and Facebook. She took my name and phone number and said that somebody would get back to me about this.

Right after I got off the phone, I did a search to see how far this had gone, already, and came up with hardly anything about it. There were a few links to the products page at jcpenny.com and not much else.

Well, within about three hours of me calling them, the shirt had been removed from their website. Of course, I’m not sure about how many other calls they received, but that was pretty quick. This morning (September 1st), I received a call from them, just after 9am. They thanked me for letting them know about it, and informed me that they were no longer selling the shirt.

Within the last hour, I decided to see just how far the “shitstorm” went, so I did a search for “too pretty for homework” on Google. To my surprise, there were over 300 results. Everything from large media sites to personal blogs had been in an uproar over this. There were 170 news articles mentioning this on Google News. An online petition had even been started, and had gathered more than 1000 signatures. JC Penny’s Facebook page was loaded with comments (both good and bad) about the shirt.

After thinking about it for a bit, I decided to write this post. I have a couple different thoughts about this.

Was the shirt sending a bad message? In my opinion, it was.

Should the problem have been noticed before the shirt was ever sold? Yes, unless JC Penny only has pretty girls working for them (j/k).

If social media was not a deciding factor in whether the shirt should remain for sale (if social media didn’t exist) would the shirt have remained on their website, for sale? Possibly.

If JC Penny was never directly called, would the shirt have been removed as fast as it was? How long would it have taken them to discover that they were the center of a shitstorm if nobody actually contacted them, and only used social media to voice their opinions?

Like I said, before, I don’t know how many other people directly called and contacted JC Penny about this. I only contacted them because I knew where this would go, once it hit Twitter and Facebook. I don’t have any loyalty to JC Penny, at all, except that they are the only place I can still seem to find Levi’s 501′s. I just hate to see anybody (a company or a person) blasted online for small mistakes, though. In the scope of everything, this was actually a pretty small mistake… too pretty!