‘We got it wrong’: Kmart apologises ‘unreservedly’ for offensive ham bag
Kmart has quickly withdrawn a potentially offensive Christmas ham bag for sale, and apologised for the blunder.
The Australian Jewish Association drew attention to a Christmas ham bag available which features the wording ‘Merry Ham-mas”, which the eagle-eyed reader may notice is uncomfortably close to being a celebration of the terrorist group Hamas.
“Check out the special Christmas bag currently available via K-Mart online. Yes, it’s real!!”, the AJA tweeted, with an image of the bag.
“Although this is potentially funny (the AJA committee has tossed around some non-PC jokes) it’s really not a good look. We suspect some product manager may cause the company some embarrassment. So we’ve politely written to Wesfarmers corporate suggesting the product be pulled.”
Kmart issued the following mea culpa to Mumbrella this afternoon:
“We got it wrong on this occasion, and we apologise unreservedly. When designing this product we clearly didn’t think through all the implications and the product has been removed from sale,” a spokesperson said.
“We were just contacted by senior management – the K-mart Ham-Mas bag is being pulled now from the website and all stores,” the AJA tweeted shortly after alerting the company to the offensive bag.
The AJA later commended Kmart for its quick response. “I want to give credit to Kmart management as they acted very quickly,” Dr. David Adler, Western Australian president of the association, said, after the retailer pulled the item from sale.
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Nathan Jolly is the Deputy Editor of Mumbrella. He joined the team in July, 2023.
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