To follow Greta Thunberg’s lead and raise awareness about how to help conserve the environment, Walmart shops in Canada decided to issue a gorgeous green t-shirt for a reasonable $5, with a thoughtful statement imprinted on the front.
The message says, “Recycle, reuse.” Renew. Rethink.”
Instead of writing the ‘re’ four times, the t-shirt design simply makes it larger than the other words and places it on the left, so it reads ‘re’ followed by ‘cycle,’ use’, ‘new’, and ‘thought’ piled on top of one another.
So far, there are no difficulties, correct? Wrong.
One observant Twitter user couldn’t help but notice that if you read the initial letter of each of the stacked words—beginning with the C for cycle and finishing with the T for thought—the t-shirt mistakenly spells out a word, giving the t-shirt a far less healthy connotation. If you don’t have it yet, it spells C**T.
Posting a photo of the t-shirt on social media, the user remarked, “I need this shirt before Walmart realizes what they’ve done.” “Find the hidden word.”
Isn’t it difficult to forget what you’ve seen?
That post quickly went viral, with almost 20,000 likes and over a thousand comments from stunned customers who couldn’t believe the item had made its way into stores without anybody spotting the obscene remark.
Someone wrote, “The C word is on full display.”
Another person responded, “I need this so that I can get a marker and circle the hidden word like a word search.”
A third individual expressed, “This explains why C U Next Tuesday gained popularity.”
Someone else asked, “What’s the over/under on whether whoever designed that shirt knew exactly what they were doing?”
“Wow, as someone who prints clothing for a living, I’m amazed this made it to the shop floor,” a consumer said. “They had to know, surely?!”
Others predicted that someone will get fired’ due to the design.
The mistakenly extremely unpleasant t-shirt was finally brought to the attention of Walmart, which subsequently said that the item had been pulled from its shops.
“We only sold the shirt at Walmart Canada locations and have removed it from stores,” a spokeswoman told FOX.
Despite being taken from Walmart stores, a simple Google search reveals that several online shops are cashing in on the NSFW design, with various variants available, all of which cost far more than the initial $5.