(ANTIMEDIA) Only three short years after Hillary Clinton stepped down as a member of Walmart’s Board of Directors, the mammoth retail chain pulled a t-shirt from their shelves for promoting the fact that a woman could someday be president of the United States.
In 1995, while Hillary was serving as First Lady, a t-shirt designer in south Florida created a shirt featuring a character named Margaret from the cartoon strip Dennis the Menace. Above the outstretched hands of Margaret read the words, “Someday a woman will be president.”
A local Walmart agreed to sell the design and actually sold over 60 of the 204 garments they ordered within the first two weeks of stocking the item. After the retailer placed an order for 100 more shirts, a customer complained.
Although the shopper’s grievance was completely asinine — considering there is always that one person who is offended by everything — it shouldn’t be terribly surprising that someone took issue with the shirt. What is surprising is that the world’s largest employer agreed with the customer’s ridiculous position and actually stopped selling the shirt. Immediately.
“In this case, it was determined the T-shirt was offensive to some people, and so the decision was made to pull it from the sales floor, “ a spokesperson for the company said at the time.
A Walmart buyer even told Ann Moliver Ruben, the creator the of the shirt, that her design “didn’t represent family values.”
The decision did spark a nationwide uproar that forced Walmart to later order 30,000 of the shirt as a form of repentance for their blunder.
“Wow, it still pains us that we made this mistake 20 years ago. We’re proud of the fact that our country – and our company – has made so much progress in advancing women in the workplace, and in society,” the retailer said in a statement that reflects on the incident.
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