Poor J.C. Penny, one of my favorite stores (yes I go there a lot and have a store credit card.) In April, the corporation’s CEO Ron Johnson, whose change in marketing strategy many believe chased customers away, resigned under pressure. Earlier this month the retail giant reported bigger loses than expected. And now it’s being accused of marketing a tea kettle that looks like the late unlamented Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler:
Bemused motorists took photographs of the huge JCPenney billboard advertising the kettle as they drove past it on the 405 Interstate highway near Culver City in California, one of America’s busiest stretches of roads.
“That Hitler looks like a kettle,” commented one user of Reddit, one of the several websites where the image was posted over the weekend.
“He even has his right arm extended,” wrote another, while a third added: “I’m a little Nazi, short and stout”.
Things that look Hitler have become a popular web meme – with the genre perhaps defined by the house in Swansea that bears an unsettling resemblance to the Nazi Fuhrer.
The kettle – officially the Michael Graves Design Bells and Whistles Stainless Steel Tea Kettle – retails for £35.08 on the JCPenney website, and can be delivered to the UK.
This is BOUND to inspire cheap shot jokes.
So let me offer a few:
–I bought one and it attacked my Gefilte fish and shoved it in the oven (but it’s not a gas stove.”)
–The whistle is a shrill “Sieg Heil!
–Didn’t Charlie Chaplin play a parody of this kettle in a movie?
–I thought it would last a thousand years but a bottle fell on it — and it was crushed by the Russian Vodka.
–Future products will include a Mussolini toilet plunger and a Sadaam Hussein necktie.
–Offer by someone on my Twitter feed: “Your final solution for boiling water!”
And, of course a theme song for TV commercial immediately comes to mind. Just rework the lyric so it’s “Teatime from Hitler”:
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.