It is bad enough that Americans are slowly getting their Holidays taken away from them by retail businesses. Holidays like Labor Day and Memorial Day, days that are supposed to be reserved for remembrance and our veterans, are overrun by blowout sales and profit-hungry corporations. Advertisers completely ignore the real reason for a holiday and instead try to persuade a person to use their holiday off to spend money at their store. Advertisers will ignore all things sacred and decent in order to make additional profits. Now, our days of mourning are starting to get taken over.
What happened on September 11, 2001 does not need to be recapped, but a recent advertisement related to the horrible day DOES need to be recapped. A mattress store in San Antonio, Texas, launched a sale on mattresses in the beginning of September. The advertisement was their ‘Twin Tower Mattress Sale’ where a customer could buy any size mattress for the price of a twin mattress. The television commercial, which was posted on the company’s Facebook page, showed a woman talking about the sale with two tall men standing behind her. What is difficult to see at the beginning of the commercial is that these fine gentlemen are standing in front of two stacks of mattresses. After the woman does her piece on how amazing it would be to buy a bed on September 11th, the men knock down the ‘Twin Tower’ stacks of mattresses, with mocking screams and shrieks in the background. The woman turns around, examines the ‘damage’ and slowly turns back to the camera with a startled look on her face, and ends the commercial with the line ‘we will never forget.’
This obviously made many people sick to their stomachs with distaste for the advertisement. The followers of their Facebook page reacted immediately to the advertisement with disgust and called for the advertisement to be removed. The advertisement was immediately pulled and the store has been indefinitely closed by the store’s owner, according to CNN. The owner issued an apology, admitted to his mistakes and pledged to donate money to a 9-11 memorial fund. But this incident presents a bigger issue. Advertisers and people who deal with the public need to have the decency to observe a day of importance and not take advantage of people having the day off in order to make money. Somewhere the line has to be drawn where a company is not going to make a mockery of the mass murder of nearly 3,000 people.
A corporation should not have to take advantage of a holiday in order to make money, they should instead focus on providing a good or service and providing the best product possible to their customers instead of re-defining a holiday with a sale in order to make a buck.
