“Regrettably, in trying to thwart a well-documented Armenian fraud ring operating in certain parts of California, a few employees took impermissible actions. While we prioritize protecting our bank and our customers from fraud, it is unacceptable to base credit decisions on national origin.”

That’s from a statement sent to CNN signed by a spokesperson for Citi (aka Citigroup).

Citi also stated “We sincerely apologize to any applicant who was evaluated unfairly. Following an internal investigation, we have taken appropriate actions with those directly involved in this matter, and we promptly put in place measures to prevent any recurrence of such conduct.”

Wait up, wait up. Armenian fraud ring? It’s a thing. We’ll get to it.

How does SorryWatch rate Citi’s apology? Eh. Not good. It works to minimize what happened. “Regrettably… a few employees… took impermissible actions.” Impermissible actions which broke the law. You know, CRIMES. But only a few employees!

It does use the word “apologize,” so points for that. Is it specific about what they did? Not much. Clearly they did base credit decisions on national origin, apparently on whether they thought you were Armenian. Which they decided by the sophisticated method of screening for names ending with “ian” or “yan.” What sort of credit decisions? They don’t specify.

Yeah, sneaky expression and her name ends with “ian.”

They do not address the impact of those credit decisions.

Like their impact on real estate agent Mary Smbatian. Smbatian told the Washington Post, “I had so much trust in Citibank. And then one day, just like, out of the blue, they just basically [upended] my life completely.” Citi closed her and her husband’s personal, credit and business accounts, without explanation. Accounts they’d had for nearly two decades. Wham! They were locked out for 30 days. Checks sent to them were turned away. Their credit was damaged. They lost spending points and rewards. Each thought the other one must have made some mistake that caused the bank actions. (Strife!) Smbatian and her husband opened new accounts at four different banks. Only later did they learn this happened because of their Armenian surnames. They are now part of a class-action lawsuit.

The reason these apology statements were made is that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) heard about this, investigated, and brought a case against Citi under the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. They found that Citi did this at least from 2015 to 2021, affecting hundreds of people. Those “few” employees called Armenians “bad guys” or, as CFPB head Rohit Chopra put it, “stereotyped Armenians as prone to crime and fraud.” Citi “illegally fabricated documents to cover up its discrimination.” Managers told employees not to “discuss it in writing or on recorded phone lines.” But some did, as in one employee asking for help with excuses to refuse credit. “It’s been a while since I declined for possible credit abuse/YAN — gimme some reasons I can use.”

The bank must pay $25.9 million – $1.4 million to people they discriminated against, and $24.5 million as a penalty. That amount was called “meaningless to Citi” by Dennis Kelleher of a financial reform advocacy group, Better Markets, who said it was about .1% of Citi’s revenue for one quarter. “Individual bankers, including executives and supervisors, must be personally punished with meaningful fines and barred from working in the industry.”At a December 2023 hearing of the Senate Banking Committee, the bank’s CEO Jane Fraser said Citi is “deeply sorry” and repeated that it was a “small number of employees” who did the forbidden things. (How many covered it up? Surely a tiny eensy-beensy number, so minute as to be undetectable.)

Back to rating the apology: how does “in trying to thwart a well-documented Armenian fraud ring…, a few employees took impermissible actions… we prioritize protecting our bank and our customers from fraud” stack up on “no excuses, explanation only if needed” scale?

Not that great. So their credit department wasn’t operating from a simple “we don’t like Armenians, no credit for them” rubric, but instead the highly nuanced “we heard some fraudsters were Armenian therefore no Armenians get credit and if we gave them credit before we take it away”? Not better.

She could borrow a bunch of money and flee the country, right?

We’re really unhappy with their “say why it won’t happen again” step. Saying ‘hardly any of us did those bad things’ isn’t persuasive, especially without more facts. What were the job titles of those “few employees”? Did this start with one person with authority over many others? Two people? One department? Three?

And why? What was their incentive? According to testimony, there were efforts to hide this discrimination from higher-ups by avoiding putting things in email, so why did they do it? Were they getting rewarded for identifying “credit risks”? After Wells Fargo]was discovered opening large numbers of unwanted accounts for customers, the bank said they had, and would change, a system that set goals for branch managers to open accounts and rewarded them for hitting those goals. Was there – is there – a system at Citi with perverse goals? (Because it’s perverse for a bank to deny credit to customers with good credit histories.)

“[W]e promptly put in place measures to prevent any recurrence of such conduct”? WHAT MEASURES ARE THOSE? Did Citi tell employees, ‘leave Armenians alone’? Or did they tell employees, “Really, really, don’t put it in email, no really”? Did they say “there is no quota for labeling people credit risks and you will not be rewarded for doing so”? Did they order a sensitivity training? If so, who got the training? Lowly minions, or the perfectly evolved executives too? Basically, if your “measures to prevent” are secret, we can’t trust them.

Okay, so what about this “well-documented Armenian fraud ring”? This apparently refers to the “Armenian Power” gang. It’s a criminal gang, started among immigrant Armenians, which peaked in the 1990s. In 2011 a gigantic law-enforcement sweep arrested nearly 100 people, on charges including kidnapping, fraud, extortion, identity theft, loansharking, robbery, witness intimidation, drug trafficking, marijuana cultivation, bringing narcotics into prison, and oh yeah murder.

A witness could EASILY be intimidated by her.

Content creators leapt on the idea, inserting Armenian gangs into Grand Theft Auto V, House of Cards, Message from the King, NCIS Los Angeles, Ray Donovan, and The Shield. Also, apparently, into the nightmares of the credit department at Citibank in the Los Angeles area. Many Armenians live in the area, (particularly Glendale, East Hollywood, and Central LA).

Maybe 80,000 Armenians and Armenian Americans live in Glendale alone. Several hundred thousand live in Southern California. Obviously most are not members of Armenian Power (which includes non-Armenians). So it’s not very likely that someone with an Armenian last name is a member of Armenian Power. 100 gang members is .05% of 200,000 people. To find them, you might want to actually look at their actual *&^+@$# credit history, right? Actually?

It would be nice to think bankers could do the math

Oh, and you know what? We don’t feel like we can kick Citigroup around without mentioning their enthusiastic financing of new fossil fuel projects. That’s something that’s going to hurt everyone – you, us, notable Armenian Kim Kardashian. Even Citi employees and the members of Armenian Power.

Maggie Tokuda-Hall writes books for kids and young adults. Her most recent: Love in the Library. It’s a picture book about her grandparents, who fell in love in the library of a prison camp in rural Idaho, where they’d been incarcerated because it was the 1940s and they were Japanese Americans. Love in the Library is a quiet, smart, thoughtful book, perfect for classroom use. Illustrator Yas Imamura’s watercolor and gouache art feels warm, textured and approachable. (And she’s great at drawing 1940s fashions!)

From Love in the Library by Maggie Tokuda-Hall, illustrated by Yas Imamura

SorryWatch read Love in the Library when it first came out, because our own book addresses the United States and Canada’s history of apologies—and lack thereof—for jailing their own citizens. And also because Snarly had devoured Tokuda-Hall’s deliciously juicy, pointed-as-a-fang young-adult graphic novel Squad, illustrated by Lisa Sterle, which may become a TV show.

On April 11, Tokuda-Hall posted a dismaying story on her blog. She’d been approached by Scholastic’s educational division, which is the Grand Moff Big Cheese Literary Muckety-Muck of getting books into schools. (We all remember the joys and sorrows of the Scholastic Book Fair, do we not?) Scholastic controls 90 percent of the school and library market. Love in the Library was published by Candlewick, a picture-book publisher with far less institutional-sale muscle. Being picked up and licensed by Scholastic could mean getting the book into many more little hands, and it could mean huge sales.

Scholastic wanted the book as part of a collection in which books would be paired with teaching materials aimed at classrooms and libraries and designed to amplify the voices of Asian Americans and Native Hawaiians/Pacific Islanders and to educate school kids about AAPI history. 

But Scholastic wanted the book to be less…challenging. They wanted Tokuda-Hall to cut her comment, in the book’s afterword, that while her grandparents’ story was one of finding love in horrible circumstances, “improbable joy does not excuse virulent racism, nor does it minimize the pain, the trauma, and the deaths that resulted from it. But it is to situate it into the deeply American tradition of racism.”

Scholastic also wanted to cut the next paragraph:

As much as I would hope this would be a story of a distant past, it is not. It’s very much the story of America here and now. The racism that put my grandparents into Minidoka is the same hate that keeps children in cages on our border. It’s the myth of white supremacy that brought slavery to our past and allows the police to murder Black people in our present. It’s the same fear that brings Muslim bans. It’s the same contempt that creates voter suppression, medical apartheid, and food deserts. The same cruelty that carved reservations out of stolen, sovereign land, that paved the Trail of Tears. Hate is not a virus; it is an American tradition.

Publishers Weekly confirmed that the Scholastic editor had written to Tokuda-Hall, “We love this book! And we want everyone in the schools we serve to read it. However, our audience is comprised of elementary school-aged children and there are some details in the Author’s Note that, although eloquently stated, are too strongly worded for what most teachers would expect to share with their students. This could lead to teachers declining to use the book, which would be a shame. To that end we are requesting [sic] make an adjustment to the Authors Note.” (Tokuda-Hall reiterated on Twitter that she’d been told the “request” was non-negotiable.) (Snarly is trying to resist pointing out that the editor uses “comprised” wrong.) (Snarly failed.)

Tokuda-Hall blogged,

They want the credibility of our identities, want to market our biographies. They want to sell our suffering, smoothed down and made palatable to the white readers they prioritize. To assuage white guilt with stories that promise to make them better people, while never threatening them, not even with discomfort.

I cried. For the opportunity I had, just moments ago, been so thrilled to receive, gone just as fast. For my resentment of being put in a position where I had to choose between my career and my ethics. For all the other people, just like me, who are likely given these kinds of choices all the time, but who— for fear of losing future opportunities, or for fear that this is their only opportunity, or who simply cannot turn down money—take the bargain. For the pure frustration that only years of dealing with the same kind of bullshit over and over again can inspire. For the fear that this kind of limitation will be what defines my career. I cried, and I felt ashamed that I was crying and furious that I’d been made to cry by an industry that will never cry over me.

Amen.

But hey, we’re here to analyze apologies!

Scholastic’s first apology was, to put it bluntly, terrible. As PW reported, Scholastic VP of Corporate Communications Anne Sparkman said, “We did not receive any direct response in advance of this evening’s blog post publication. We are very sorry for how this is all unfolding. We wish the conversation around Love in the Library could have continued with the author and her editors because we very much wanted the book to be available in our collection to reach as many students as possible.”

Why is this terrible? “We’re very sorry for how this is all unfolding” takes no responsibility and blames Tokuda-Hall for going public. The statement doesn’t address WHY requesting/demanding these edits was a problem. It merely holds Tokuda-Hall responsible for the bad publicity Scholastic is now getting. It implies that if the conversation “could have continued” the problem might have been resolved quietly…even though Tokuda-Hall says she was told the edits were non-negotiable. And Sparkman makes it out to be Tokuda-Hall and Candlewick’s fault that now the book won’t reach “as many students as possible.” But frankly, her statement dovetails what Scholastic said initially: Don’t use the word “racism” and don’t talk about racism as an ongoing problem, and we’ll make sure more kids see the book. (As bestselling Scholastic middle-grade author Kelly Yang notes, it’s probably no coincidence that this particular division of Scholastic is based in Florida, one of our current book-banning epicenters. Shout-out, Ron DeSantis.)

The advisors to Scholastic’s AAPI project (officially called the Rising Voices Amplifying AANHPI Narratives collection, a mouthful) spoke up as well, saying that they were “blindsided by this news” of Tokuda-Hall’s censorship. These experts (an educator from Hawaii, an author/elementary school principal from the Sacramento area and an author/high school principal from the Bay Area, and a NYT-bestselling author and physician in New York, from varying Asian American backgrounds) had been the ones to ask Scholastic to distribute Love in the Library. They were devastated. One (full disclosure: she and Snarly follow one another on Twitter but have never met) stepped down from the committee in protest. Another made this statement on behalf of the committee:

Scholastic blinked. And delivered an excellent apology. Here’s the vital bit, from Scholastic President and CEO Peter Warwick:

Love in the Library is a beautiful and important book, and we all agree that it would be a tremendous addition to this classroom library collection. However, in our initial outreach we suggested edits to Ms. Tokuda-Hall’s author’s note. This approach was wrong and not in keeping with Scholastic’s values. We don’t want to diminish or in any way minimize the racism that tragically persists against Asian-Americans.

We have reached out to Candlewick to apologize to Ms. Tokuda-Hall, Yas Imamura, the illustrator, and the editors. It is our sincere hope that we can start this conversation over and still be able to share this important story about Ms. Tokuda-Hall’s grandparents, who met in a WWII Incarceration camp, with the author’s note unchanged.

We also met today with the collection’s mentors (authors and educators from the AANHPI communities) to apologize for our actions in seeking to change the author’s note, to hear their most recent thoughts, and to answer their questions and concerns. It was a moving and instructive experience for us. We had not consulted them on such an important issue as this, we had therefore put at risk their trust in us and caused personal anguish and harm. We must never do this again. We will be reviewing our curating and publishing processes to ensure that all our decisions and actions are consistent with our Credo, which unequivocally states our belief in the value of every individual, as well as the importance of representation, accuracy, and diverse voices in the stories, information, and teaching materials we share with educators, families, and communities.

Please know that we will always stand against censorship. We are trusted to have a creative partnership with our authors and illustrators to ensure that all voices are heard and that children everywhere have access to authentic stories and information that helps them learn about history, grow, and discover who they are. No division will request edits to any published books for our collections moving forward, something that has been, and remains, our policy.

Why is this a very good apology? It hits all 6.5 of our steps. It uses the word “apologize” rather than “regret.” It names the offense. It takes ownership and shows understanding of the impact of the wrongdoing. It makes no excuses. It discusses the steps that will be taken to ensure that something like this doesn’t happen again. It makes an offer of repair. And the statement itself is an indication of step 6.5: Scholastic is listening.

What it fails to do is explain how this happened in the first place, despite Warwick’s claim (boast?) that not censoring licensed books has always been the company’s policy. And there’s no mention of the mentors’ request for a donation to PEN America or We Need Diverse Books. Still, it’s a big step for a big publisher. (Despite the communication exec’s statement shading Tokuda-Hall for bringing negative publicity upon Scholastic, it’s also unlikely that the about-face would have happened without the negative publicity.)

Does an apology change the past? No. Do we note that the sentence, “No division will request edits to any published books for our collections moving forward, something that has been, and remains, our policy” is weirdly self-laudatory and suss, given that this policy was obviously disregarded in at least one case (and, we must suspect, others)? Yes. But we commend Tokuda-Hall for speaking out; we commend Scholastic’s advisors and other authors for backing Tokuda-Hall and calling Scholastic to account; and we commend Scholastic for apologizing well on the second try.

We’re living in an unprecedented time of book bans. Yeah, we know everybody says “unprecedented” about everything these days. But it’s true: Book removals and challenges to schools and libraries doubled in 2022 over 2021. Doubled! Deep-pocketed conservative organizations are increasingly, quietly, aggressively backing efforts aimed at getting local libraries, schools and community boards to get rid of children’s and young-adult books that honestly address race, gender, and sexuality. But “soft censorship” by well-meaning allies, which is what happened here, is insidious too. Trying to placate people who will perpetually move the goalposts; who don’t want white children ever to feel uncomfortable about their country’s history; who don’t want trans kids to exist; who don’t want human children to know that yep, two male penguins can choose to pair up and raise a chick together; who don’t want kids ever to read about slavery or police brutality? This is an un-winning strategy. It’s why we need to support our local public libraries…and their independence.

A library brought meaning, if not freedom, to Maggie Tokuda-Hall’s grandparents; libraries can help bring freedom to the rest of us.

Greetings, fellow apology fans! Let’s explore one of the worst corporate apologies in recent memory!

Oh, Lufthansa, do you not remember the saga of United’s terrible apologies in 2017? Do you not recall the public outcry after United forcibly “re-accommodated” a 69-year-old man, Dr. James Dao, during an “overbook situation”? The “situation” (a word used no fewer than 7 times by United’s erstwhile CEO, Oscar Munoz) in which Chicago cops dragging the gentleman, bloodied and screaming, out of the plane? Leaving him with a concussion, a broken nose, and two broken teeth? The situation that United called “an upsetting event for all of us at United”? (Poor United.) The situation in which United blamed Dr. Dao for having “defied” the cops and having “raised his voice”? And claimed that he “continued to resist” despite being “politely asked to de-plane,” implying that his conduct was justification for violence, for being forcefully “de-planed” from the flight for which he had bought a ticket? Remember how United claimed to have apologized personally to Dr. Dao, which his daughter said did not happen? And then remember how PR Week wrote, “the episode and subsequent response will be quoted in textbooks as an example of how not to respond in a crisis”?

Congrats, Lufthansa! You’re now sitting next to United right by the toilets on Flight #666 of WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU Airlines! United, scoot over! Stop hogging the armrest!

The backstory: Over 100 Jews were booted from a connecting flight from Frankfurt to Budapest last week, apparently because on the first leg of the flight, some had refused to wear masks. (No one has yet said how many people refused to wear masks. One passenger said he saw three. None were immediately identifiable as Jews.) Yet for some reason, all the passengers who were prevented from boarding—and furthermore, banned from Lufthansa flights for the next 24 hours—were either dressed in identifiably Hasidic Jewish garb (black hats, beards, visible fringes/tzitzit, etc.) or had Jewish-sounding names.

Most of the Hasidim were headed to a small village in Hungary, to the grave of Rabbi Yeshaya Steiner (aka Reb Shayele), founder of the Kerestirer Hasidic dynasty. There’s an annual pilgrimage to the final resting place of this rabbi, a turn-of-the-century wise man who was considered modest, able to perform miracles, and very good at getting rid of mice.

When one passenger complained to a Lufthansa representative that he’d been wearing his mask the whole time, so why should he be punished, she replied, “It was Jewish people who were the mess, who made the problems.” And though only a few people had disobeyed the mask rule, “everybody has to pay for a couple.” An announcement was also made (by a different Lufthansa employee) in the boarding area, after all the non-Jews had boarded: “Due to an operational reason coming from the flight from New York, all passengers here, we have to cancel you on this flight.” Pause. “You know why it was.” Passengers are heard exclaiming, “We don’t know why!” (There’s video, originally shared by the site Dan’s Deals, that shows the woman representative blaming all the Jews for the sins of a few Jews, as well as footage of the male gate agent announcing that the flight —with only a handful of non-Jewish-appearing people on it — would be leaving without the Jews. Be forewarned, you may find these videos hard to watch. Seeing confused, visibly religious Jews being surrounded by uniformed police officers marked with POLIZEI in big block letters on their backs will be dismaying for some people, given some people’s histories and truncated family trees. Also, do not read the comments unless you love marinating in antisemitism.)

Jewish customers also said they were physically prevented from going to the customer service desk. Some were able to make it to their destination by booking on other airlines, but it seems that most of the travelers missed the Reb Shayele event. The Washington Post reported that one punished passenger managed to get on a Lufthansa flight to Austria, despite the 24-hour ban, by buying his ticket online. (On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a Hasid.) He drove straight from Vienna to the Hungarian village of Kerestir (aka Bodrogkeresztúr). But “when he tried to fly home the next day, he was told that his ticket was invalid because he had not completed the full outbound flight. It cost him $1,100 for a new return seat on Lufthansa.” Charming.

OK, so what’s wrong with Lufthansa’s apology? A short list.

1. It doesn’t start with the apology. “Lufthansa regrets” is about how Lufthansa (an entity, not even a human) feels. An apology should center how the passengers feel.
2. The “circumstances surrounding the decision”? What circumstances, pray tell? Name the offense.
3. “While Lufthansa is still reviewing the facts” carries a hint of “Hey, not all the facts are in! We don’t know what really happened! Maybe this is a he said/she-said/120 Jews said” situation!”
4. Calling all the Jews on the flight “the large group” implies that they were all together. They weren’t. There’s an insinuation, intentional or not, that the Jews are this collective, icky mass. Again, this is historically displeasing.
5. Don’t just “apologize to all the passengers unable to travel on this flight.” Apologize to everyone. Prejudice hurts everyone.
6. “Inconvenience”? Really? They were harassed, insulted, surrounded by German police. Many missed the holy-to-them event for which they were traveling in the first place.
7. How lovely that you have “zero tolerance for racism, anti-Semitism and discrimination.” The proof is in der Pudding. Right now, your philosophy is just words. Your supposed values and your employees’ conduct are quite clearly at odds.
8. A more excusable thing, but: the current spelling of choice is not “anti-Semitism.” It’s “antisemitism.” Why? Because the hyphen, favored by the nineteenth-century right-wing German politician who popularized this term, implies that “anti-Semitism” counters some false prevailing sentiment of “Semitism” — meaning that everybody ELSE is out here thinking Jews are AWESOME (which, no). Rendering the word as “Anti-Semitism” obscures the fact that this particular -ism is specifically about—nay, was originally all about ENCOURAGING—the hatred of JEWS. Not Semites, a noun no one actually uses. (Everyone can feel free to call it “Jew hatred” or “bias against Jews.” Hatred of other Semitic peoples migh be termed, depending on who’s being hated on, “Islamophobia” or “hatred of Arabs.” Be precise about your hate language!) While there are still holdouts who favor using the hyphen in anti-Semitism, that’s not the way the world is going. The New York Times recently changed its style guide from “anti-Semitism” to “antisemitism.”  The AP did too. “Antisemitism” is now the preferred spelling at The Forward and Tablet (both former employers of Snarly), and JTA (the international news organization formerly known as the Jewish Telegraphic Agency; inexplicably Snarly has not worked there). It’s favored by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and the esteemed Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt, who literally wrote the book on antisemitism and who has been actively anti-hyphen campaigning for years. “Antisemitism” is also the preferred spelling in academia. Listen to people who’ve done the work of researching history.
9. MORE IMPORTANTLY, Lufthansa, where is the discussion of how you’ll make things right?
10. THE STATEMENT NEVER SAYS THE WORD “JEW” OR “JEWISH.”

So much no.

Germany has done a stupendous job of grappling with its shameful history, far better than most countries (cough, cough, UnitedStatesofAmerica) have done. SorryWatch believes in redemption and appreciation of the hard work of self-inventory, and…if not forgiveness, the possibility of repair and the re-earning of trust. But antisemitism is a cancer, a sneaky malady plaguing both the right and the left, and it keeps coming back if you’re not vigilant. And we will not appreciate comments on this post saying either “Well, it’s Germany—of course” or “But Israel.”

Please, Lufthansa: do the work. Take a hard look. Discuss procedures. Retrain the staff. Fire the folks who made these terrible decisions. Offer financial settlements to those you hurt. Snarly has a soft spot in her heart for Lufthansa; years ago, she was traveling with an infant, and omg, the bulkhead seats have pull-down bassinets! The flight attendants asked, unsolicited, if she’d like a cup of hot water in which to warm a bottle! There was a new father on the plane, flying home with his just-adopted baby, and the flight crew were so kind to him when he was stressing out!

Lufthansa, we’re rooting for you to make it right.

Any time, and especially during a pandemic lockdown, lots of parents are attracted to the idea of educational software for their kids, maybe especially if it’s entertaining. Take that energy they put into games and use it to get them learning! Win win!

Some teachers like the idea, too. Libraries. Schools.

A company called ABCmouse offers just such software. The home page has a cartoon teacher gesturing to a diverse group of children happily reading, doing geometry and color puzzles, building with blocks, etc., in a Montessori-style classroom. “Reading. Math. Science. Art & Colors” says a banner. Ooh, and it says you can

“Try it FREE for 30 days!”

Underneath,

“Then just $12.99/mo. until canceled.”

Then it says,

“Click Here to Learn More”

– though if you do, you won’t learn more about the offer. You’ll get several minutes of promo about an “award-winning early learning academy for kids ages 2 through 8” …“over ten thousand activities”… “you see learning – your child sees fun!”… “your child will never run out of things to do”… “fill in your info and let your adventure begin.” Plus, no ads.

This Gyosai print “depicts money-bearing mice being welcomed into the house of Daikoku, one of the Seven Gods of Good Fortune.”

What happens if you “let your adventure begin” and then you wish to end your adventure? Maybe your kids don’t like it. Maybe it doesn’t let you log on and you can’t get customer support to respond. Maybe you think it’s too game-y and not educational enough. Maybe it bugs you AND YOUR KID that when your kid “earns a ticket” and goes to spend it in the “store” it turns out there’s a “boys’ store” and a separate “girls’ store.” (No leggings for you, sonny!) Maybe you feel that the music video about the letter B is appallingly sexist.

Whatever, you can stop paying for it any time.

Yet no. People were finding that cancellation was impossible. If they signed up for, say, a 6-month membership, it was renewed whether they agreed or no. When people noticed that they kept being charged, they might try to cancel – ha! Same with the 12-month membership, or the “Free 30-day trial” membership. It was easy to sign up and very very very hard to stop.

People called to cancel, or emailed to cancel – NOPE, you have to do it online. Online, they went through a “lengthy and confusing process” to cancel – yet the charges kept coming. So we’re talking a few soreheads too careless to jump through the required hoops? Actually, we’re talking HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of soreheads, who did jump through the hoops, and still didn’t get their memberships canceled.

FTC building in Washington, D.C.

It was so bad that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC)’s Bureau of Consumer Protection got involved. They filed an Order for Permanent Injunction and Monetary Judgment. That meant payments totaling nearly $10 million to 206,814 people. That was in September 2020.

The FTC’s Andrew Smith said, “ABCmouse didn’t clearly tell parents that their subscriptions would renew automatically, and then the company made it very difficult for them to cancel.” ABCmouse “failed to provide consumers with a simple way to stop the automatic renewals, despite promising ‘Easy Cancellation’ at the time of enrollment. … consumers who tried to cancel by calling or emailing ABCmouse or submitting a customer support form were instead required to negotiate a lengthy and confusing process that often prevented many consumers from being able to complete their cancellations.

“In some cases, even consumers who completed the full cancellation process later discovered recurring charges for services they thought they had cancelled… between 2015 and 2018, hundreds of thousands of consumers who visited the ABCmouse cancellation path nevertheless remained subscribed.”

FTC Commissioner Rohit Chopra issued a statement saying this was “disappointing” and went on to speak of deceptive “dark patterns” and “dirty dealing” and finally said “roach motel.” As in the Black Flag insecticidal product that promises “Roaches check in… but they don’t check out.” We think the FTC is not likening consumers to roaches, but rather is likening misleading corporate policies to toxic trickery.

No phone, no pool, no pets. Also? Ain’t got no cigarettes.

So the FTC collected the big settlement from ABCmouse and sent refunds to all the cheated customers it identified.

Surely ABCmouse was apologetic? Surely they abased themselves? Ehhh, not so much. According to The Markup, a newsroom which reports on Big Tech, the company Age of Learning, which owns ABCmouse (also ReadingIQ and Adventure Academy), emailed, “The facts do not support the FTC’s broad claims, and the vast majority of ABCmouse customers are highly satisfied with their memberships. While we cannot comment on litigation, we want every family to have a great experience with ABCmouse and regret any confusion that any subscriber may have had.”

TERRIBLE statement. Not an actual apology. It uses the classic dodge, beloved of corporations and politicians, of saying they REGRET the bad thing, but taking zero responsibility for it. They blame those ‘confused’ families for thinking there was a problem. Problems. Hundreds of thousands of problems. You’d think a company that teaches children how to use language would be able to transact business with clarity – unless… is it possible?… they don’t mind making more money by cheating people. It’s a side hustle! (And why can’t they comment on litigation? Litigation that has been concluded?)

We said it before, and we’ll surely need to say it again: regret is not apology. Anyone can regret a sad or bad thing – those who caused it, those who experienced it, those who witnessed it, those who are only reading about it now. It’s a shame that happened! How regrettable! Those poor people!

For example, Sumac regrets that people were cheated and frustrated and given the run-around, some of them for years, while Age of Learning and ABCmouse enjoyed the use of their money – but I am not responsible and THEY ARE. They should be saying more than “regret.”

Doug Dohring.

SorryWatch, finding the integrity of ABCmouse doubtful, started to worry about data the company is amassing on families who use its products. Poking around, we learned that ABCmouse belongs to Age of Learning, which is run by big-wheel Scientologists Laurie and Doug Dohring. That didn’t reassure us. We don’t know enough about how Scientology retains its members to say whether there’s any similarity.

Also, poking around, we learned that there are STILL people getting billed after trying to get away. Pissed Consumer‘s graphs indicate that the top two complaint issues are activation/cancellation and payments and charges.

Sounds like it’s time to get the FTC back on the case.

When the FTC’s away, the mice will play

As the Covid-19 pandemic washes around the world, people act like people, sometimes well, sometimes badly. Sometimes they apologize for the bad parts.

People are giving out false or distorted information, making murderous suggestions, or indulging in criminal recklessness. And more, but those are big ones. Sometimes they apologize, but not so often.

These are not Sports Direct warehouse employees. They are soldiers with the 1918 flu.

Lots of dumb, bad, and/or mean behavior arises from ignorance and lack of imagination. Most of us are lucky – we’ve had no experience with plagues, epidemics, or pandemics. We also may not have read any history, or international news, or even fiction, about these things, and we may find it hard to imagine what life is like when serious contagious disease is rampaging out of control.

Perhaps that’s the case for Mike Ashley of Britain, billionaire owner of the Sports Direct chain. He’s a controversial figure, as they say, and if you want to know more, you could start by asking supporters of Newcastle United, a team which he bought and periodically offers for sale. Or people who work at his gulag – wait, his Sports Direct warehouse.

SorryWatch has not been following Ashley’s career, but now he’s created another controversy, and apologized.

The UK decreed that businesses must close for now unless they’re essential – essential like grocery stores, pharmacists, etc. Hospitals. This is, as you know, part of an urgent effort to keep the virus from spreading rapidly. Ashley said Sports Direct outlets are essential and would stay open. In times like these, what keeps upper lips stiffer than team-emblazoned clothing? If you can’t get a mask, what about a designer sports bra? Actually, no, they said they also sell sports equipment you could use to exercise at home.

Cholera epidemic, New York, 1865. TAKE NO MEDICINE WITHOUT ADVICE. Medical advice. Not advice from reckless babblers.

The government said no, not essential. Ashley didn’t give up, lobbying furiously. Even tweeting prime minister Boris Johnson. (End run!) (Unpopular unsuccessful end run!)

The response from the public, Sports Direct staff, and the government was unfavorable. Widespread anger and contempt might be one way to put it. “Who on earth does Mike Ashley think he is? He’s prepared to endanger the life of his employees and the public at large,” said Ian Lavery, chair of the Labour Party.

After a few days, Ashley apologized in an open letter:

…I thought it was necessary to address and apologise for much of what has been reported across various media outlets regarding my personal actions and those of the Frasers Group business.

Our intentions were only to seek clarity from the Government as to whether we should keep some of our stores open; we would never have acted against their advice. In hindsight, our emails to the Government were ill-judged and poorly timed, when they clearly had much greater pressures than ours to deal with. On top of this, our communications to our employees and the public on this was poor.

There has been no dress rehearsal for what we as a nation are currently tackling, and I for one am immensely proud of how our Government, our NHS & all of our key workers have handled the situation so far. I would especially like to thank my Frasers Group employees… We are working very hard to save our business, so that we can continue to be one of the biggest employers on the UK high street once this pandemic has passed.

…I have offered our support to the NHS and we are poised and ready for when that offer is accepted, with our entire fleet of lorries at their disposal – to help deliver medical equipment and supplies….

Finally, to reiterate, I am deeply apologetic about the misunderstandings of the last few days. We will learn from this and will try not to make the same mistakes in the future.

I strongly encourage everyone to follow the Government’s advice, stay safe and healthy through these challenging times, not least my employees.

That is not a good apology. It’s evasive. If you let him slide on saying “it’s necessary to… apologise” and “I am deeply [apologetic]” rather than “I apologise”, you should still notice that he does not actually say what he’s apologizing for. He just says communications were ill-judged, poorly timed, and yeah, poor. He doesn’t say that what he was trying to achieve would have put tens of thousands of people at risk of disease, not to mention death, including those employees he says he’s so fond of. (See that gulag link for more about the alleged tenderness with which employees are treated.)

“La Convalesence,” Florent Crabeels, before 1896. It gets better.

There’s a backhanded swipe at the media, followed by excuses. We were only trying to seek clarity! It was a misunderstanding! We never had a dress rehearsal! (We SO did not see the Spanish Inquisition coming! Did u?)

There’s flag waving to show Ashley’s and the companies’ patriotism! Have a fleet of lorries on us!

So, no.

Sports Direct isn’t the only entity that thinks its business is more essential than keeping healthy people from catching the virus from people who don’t know they’re sick. Hello, hobby supplier. Good morning, Pastor. Hi, President Falwell, I’d like you to meet my blackjack dealer.

Lockdowns are absolutely dreadful for most businesses. Many won’t survive. But don’t feel too bad for Sports Direct. That equipment they sell to keep fit at home? You can order it online, and Sports Direct has jacked up the prices!

Thanks, and a cordial although distant hat-tip, to Wendy G.

SorryWatch is still in recovery from Lance Armstrong‘s and Ray Rice‘s godawful apologies. However, at the urging of a longtime baseball fan and blogger who was not authorized to speak on the record, SorryWatch agreed to wade into the Houston Astros mess. A mess of the team’s own making. A mess that doubled and tripled like a wad of fermenting dough, thanks to executives’ decision to lie and obfuscate about it. When their lies were called out, they opted not to apologize; instead, they chose to up the awfulness with a sprinkling of shitty apologies like poppy seeds except mouse turds and the bakery should be shut down by the Department of Health. Snarly does not know why she is suddenly mired in a bread metaphor. Maybe because The Great British Bake Show is a balm in these troubled times.

Brandon. Brent. Chad. Chet. Blake. Brant. Brett. Chip.

The story, as told by badass Sports Illustrated reporter Stephanie Apstein: After winning the pennant, the Astros were partying in their locker room when Assistant General Manager Brandon Taubman spotted three female reporters, one of whom was wearing a purple bracelet for Domestic Violence Awareness Month. Taubman began to scream at them, “Thank God we got Osuna! I’m so fucking glad we got Osuna!”

An odd cheer, given that pitcher Roberto Osuna “had been, by Baseball Reference’s calculations and any intelligent observer’s assessment,” as Apstein pointed out, “the least valuable Astro that night.” Osuna had just allowed a two-run homer at the top of the ninth inning that tied the game. By these metrics, Snarly could have been the most valuable Astro that night, and she is a middle-aged woman in New York City.

The backstory, which (again) Apstein provides (again, read her story here): The Astros had acquired Osuna from the Blue Jays toward the end of the pitcher’s 75-game suspension. He’d been charged with assaulting the mother of his three-year-old. She refused to return to Canada from Mexico to testify against him, so prosecutors ultimately dropped the charges, and Osuna merely had to agree to counseling and to stay away from the woman in question. For the Astros, the price for Osuna was right, since few teams wanted the PR hit of hiring this dude. Many Astros’ fans, as well as anti-domestic-violence advocates, were dismayed.

But why did Taubman start howling about Osuna to three female reporters, anyway? “None of those women were talking to him,” Apstein said. “They weren’t even talking about Osuna. Taubman brought him up.”

When Apstein asked the Astros’ PR office if she could interview Taubman about what, precisely, he meant with his banshee-like shrieking, they refused to make him available. They also told Apstein not to write about what happened. She did anyway. The Astros then issued a statement:

Guest post from Jonelle Patrick

Yes, getting caught red-handed falsifying safety data on the shock-absorbing equipment that’s supposed to keep skyscrapers from falling down in an earthquake is the kind of thing that might warrant a public apology. This week, the KYB Corporation admitted that twenty-eight buildings – including a major Tokyo train station and the landmark 634-meter high Skytree – were constructed using products on which they’d faked the test data. And – oops! – they’ve been doing it for fifteen years.

The Tokyo Skytree. Tallest tower in the world, tallest building in Japan. Their website says the KYB shock absorbers have “no problem with their performance”, and “We are sorry for causing so many worries.”

Japan is well-known as the land of hilariously inadequate apologies, but the company executives responsible for this latest debacle really strapped on their best weaselfaces to deal with this one.

Bowing deeply in front of the requisite number of tangled microphone cords, KYB “senior manager” Keisuke Saito trotted out the short and not-so-sweet:

We would like to apologize for this sort of inappropriate action.

These KYB products look great. No need to test them at all.

You don’t have to be the sharpest red pen on the Sorrywatch desk to spot that putting “would like to” in front of the otherwise righteous word “apologize” immediately deflates the meaning from “we are genuinely sorry” to “we are entertaining the idea of being sorry.” And “this sort of inappropriate action” not only laughably fails to describe the act requiring an apology, it suggests the unnamed transgression is something on the order of “we let slip a silent-but-deadly poot at the dinner table,” not “a two hundred story tourist attraction built with our products might collapse in the next Big One because we faked the test data.”

It gets worse. A spokesman for the Japanese government ministry that failed to oversee KYB’s manufacturing safety compliance joined them in a classic Bad Apology Duet, rising up on his hind legs to declare:

This action, which has brought deep concern to building owners and users, as well as weakening public trust about safety, is extremely regrettable.

No no, it’s not the Leaning Skytree of Tokyo, just an artistic angle.

Regrettable? Failing to call the Emperor “Your Highness” is regrettable. Allowing a company to get away with falsifying data on earthquake safety equipment is something else. Like, maybe, criminal?

And what happened to the essential part of the apology where the contrite parties outline how they plan to fix this mess? The company has been as silent as a heap of earthquake rubble on this subject, leaving the watchdog ministry to waffle, “We don’t know how and why data were falsified and so we have ordered (the companies) to investigate the cause and submit a report on it.”

Well, alrighty then – the corporation responsible for faking their product testing for the past decade and a half is going to be in charge of the investigation into their own wrongdoing.

The difference between this sorryfail and others that have resulted from government and industry working together like shower drains and mildew, is that seven very tall buildings housing government ministries are among the twenty-eight known to be outfitted with KYB earthquake equipment. Which means that despite the lack of any real apology, some of these buildings might actually get fixed.

#

When not condemning bad Japanese apologies to death by a thousand cuts, Jonelle Patrick writes novels set in Tokyo, reveals the cost of a beetle funeral and the secret to getting into a host club on her Only In Japan blog, and points out where you can make your own plastic food on The Tokyo Guide I Wish I’d Had</span. She lives in Tokyo and San Francisco.

Hey, time for your periodic reminder about how to apologize well!

A good apology uses the words “I’m sorry” or “I apologize.” It names the offense. It takes responsibility. It shows understanding of the effect — the impact — of the offense. It explains the steps being taken to ensure that the offense never happens again. And if possible, it makes amends or performs reparations.

Recently a SorryWatch reader shared this excellent piece in which a crisis communications expert explains why current apology-esque campaigns by Facebook, Uber and Wells Fargo are abject, attempted-butt-cover-y failures. Facebook’s ad uses the phrase “something happened” to gloss over why people love Facebook less than they used to; Becky Honeyman of SourceCode Communications notes, “Facebook is missing a step by saying it’s a nameless, faceless entity’s fault.” Uber’s ad focuses on its new CEO, who talks about the company’s “next chapter.” Honeyman criticizes, “He says ‘I took on this challenge,’ but glosses over the reason he was brought on in the first place.” And Wells Fargo focuses in an old-timey manner on its long and storied history, rather than talking explicitly about its recent ethics and legal scandals. Honeyman sums up what all three companies did wrong: “[They] need to express remorse, take responsibility and then say what’s going to change.”

Mark Zuckerberg, far right, needs to be more transparent.

Exactly. SorryWatch has noted that many Goliaths fails at apologizing. Fortunately, this afternoon gave us a great example from a teensy David of how to apologize well. In this case, the apology is for a data breach (lordy, remember Equifax’s apology?), and the apology purveyor is goth-y fragrance company Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab (BPAL). Today BPAL sent an email entitled “Notice of Data Breach” to customers (full disclosure: Snarly is one, and received this email, but she has no other conflict of interest). Read it in full below the cut. Notice how it does ALL THE THINGS a Good Apology has to do, and bonus, it is written in plain English instead of BizDev Bullshit or legalistic gobbledegook. The one thing it does not do is make reparations, but I’m not sure what that would mean? For a small company, sending everybody free perfume is probably a non-starter, though it would be fragrant and awesome. (I’m wearing Cthulhu, my fave BPAL scent, right now! It does not actually smell like a tentacled monster of the sunken deep, as far as I know, but who can say?)

Apologize well, or be summoned to the nightmare corpse city.

Dearest BPAL customers,

We have lousy news to share: some time between May 1st and May 16th, the Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab site was hacked. [This does not apply to Trading Post or TAL; it was only BPAL’s main site that was affected.]

There is no way for our dev team to be absolutely certain when the attack initially happened, so this is the best educated guess based on the information we have. This is the first time that our data has been breached in the sixteen years that we’ve been in business. We take our customers’ privacy, confidentiality, and security extremely seriously, and we are devastated that this incident occurred.

Yesterday, we learned from our devs that all passwords on the site needed to be changed. At the time, we didn’t have further details but took immediate steps to learn what was going on, and the moment that the malicious code was discovered, our devs neutralized it.

I didn’t want to post more until we understood exactly what happened. Although we cannot be sure that any of your information was accessed or misappropriated, we want to make you aware of the situation and provide you with information on what to do from here. So, here’s what we know as of today:

WHAT HAPPENED

Malicious code was injected into the portion of the checkout page where credit card info bound for AuthorizeNet is gathered. If you made a purchase using the AuthorizeNet gateway during this period, your credit card data may have been compromised. We do not store any credit card info ourselves on the site – none whatsoever – so there was no credit card data to harvest from before this time period.

Any purchases made through the PayPal gateway were not affected. Any sales made in-person at a convention were not affected, nor were any purchases made through BPTP, TAL, our Amazon store, or our etsy shop.

On May 16th, our developer found this malicious code, but didn’t immediately know what it was about. We immediately initiated the sitewide password reset to be safe while the developer tried to suss out what was going on. Most of the day was spent analyzing the code, and based on the information we now have, our developer determined that the malicious code was inserted for the purposes of harvesting credit card numbers.

Once that was established, I started drafting this announcement while Black Phoenix and our developers continued to research the situation.

It looks like fewer than 150 credit card transactions were at risk, and we will do everything in our power to directly contact anyone that might have been compromised.

WHAT INFORMATION WAS INVOLVED

The credit card numbers of under 150 customers who made purchases on the site using the AuthorizeNet gateway have possibly been compromised.

We do not know if any other data was accessed, as a bogus admin account was created by the person(s) who created the breach. Information that could have been accessed without authorization could have included your name, credit card billing address, telephone number, email address, and credit card number data, the name on card, expiration date, and security code.

WHAT WE ARE DOING

We take our obligation to safeguard your information very, very seriously, and we did all that was within our power to act as quickly as possible. A bulk password reset was initiated as soon as malicious activity was suspected. As soon as the malicious code was found, our developers neutralized it. A full security audit was performed. We moved the entirety of the site to a new server with a managed infrastructure for added security. When the fake admin account was found, it was removed. Our developer is in the process of further hardening our security to ensure that breaches do not occur in the future and initiating a more robust intrusion detection system, and we are in the process of directly contacting the 150ish people whose credit card numbers may have been compromised. We are also notifying AuthorizeNet, the FBI, and local law enforcement in Los Angeles, CA.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

We don’t know if the hacker successfully retrieved any data, but we strenuously recommend that if you used AuthorizeNet as your payment gateway on our site between May 1st and May 16th, you keep a close eye on your credit card transactions and report to your issuing bank that your card may have been compromised. Equifax also provides Identity Theft Prevention Tips, which provides additional steps that you can take, including instructions for obtaining a free copy of your credit report and how to place a fraud alert and/or credit freeze on your report.

We recommend that you remain vigilant for incidents of fraud and identity theft by reviewing account statements and monitoring your credit reports. You may obtain a free copy of your credit report from each company listed below once every 12 months by requesting your report online at www.annualcreditreport.com, calling toll-free 1-877-322-8228, or mailing an Annual Credit Report Request Form (available at www.annualcreditreport.com) to: Annual Credit Report Request Service, P.O. Box 105281, Atlanta, GA, 30348-5281. You may also purchase a copy of your credit report by contacting any of the credit reporting agencies below:

Equifax
PO Box 740241
Atlanta, GA 30374
www.equifax.com
888-766-0008

Experian
PO Box 9554
Allen, TX 75013
www.experian.com
888-397-3742

TransUnion
PO Box 2000
Chester, PA 19016
www.transunion.com
800-680-7289

If you believe you are the victim of identity theft, you should contact the proper law enforcement authorities, including local law enforcement, and you should consider contacting your state attorney general and/or the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”). You may also contact the FTC to obtain additional information about avoiding identity theft.

Federal Trade Commission, Consumer Response Center
600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20580;
1-877-IDTHEFT (438-4338)
www.ftc.gov/idtheft

State Attorneys General: Information on how to contact your state attorney general may be found at www.naag.org/naag/attorneys-general/whos-my-ag.php.

You may obtain information from the FTC and the credit reporting agencies listed above about placing a fraud alert and/or credit freeze on your credit report.

The State of California has a web site with further information to help consumers when their data has been breached: https://oag.ca.gov/privacy/other-privacy/breach-help-tips-for-consumers

FOR MORE INFORMATION

We are deeply committed to our customers, and I am profoundly upset that this breach occurred. We will continue to do everything in our power to ensure that this does not happen again in the future, and I hope that you can accept my heartfelt apology. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us at answers@blackphoenixalchemylab.com.
With all my heart, I am so, so sorry.
Elizabeth Barrial
President, Black Phoenix, Inc.

NBC just fired Joshua Cooper Ramo, whom they’d hired to do analysis for the Olympics.

These winter Olympics are being held in South Korea. During the opening ceremonies, Ramo commented that from 1910 to 1945, Korea was occupied by Japan, “but every Korean will tell you that Japan is a cultural, technological and economic example that has been so important to their own transformation,” he added.

What? NO. Not according to this petition signed by thousands of South Koreans, which reads in part, “Any reasonable person familiar with the history of Japanese imperialism, and the atrocities it committed before and during World War II, would find such statement deeply hurtful and outrageous…. And… no South Korean would attribute the rapid growth and transformation of its economy, technology, and political/cultural development to the Japanese imperialism.”

Japanese troops leaving Korea in 1945, under admiring gazes of local residents.

NBC apologized. A different newsperson read a statement saying, “During our coverage of the Parade of Nations… we said it was notable that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe made the trip to Korea for the Olympics, ‘representing Japan, a country which occupied Korea from 1910 to 1945 but every Korean will tell you that Japan is a cultural, technological and economic example that has been so important to their own transformation.’ We understand the Korean people were insulted by these comments and we apologize.”

Good that they specified what they were apologizing for, but after that? Not so good. Ramo should have been the one to apologize. The apology should have said WHY the comment was deemed insulting (Hint: ‘They admire and imitate the country that attacked and occupied them’ doesn’t usually go over well.) The passive construction of “we understand [they]… were insulted” is also bad. How about “that was insulting”?

Ramo.

No one is even saying “comfort women,” an ongoing issue between South Korea and Japan.

By the next day, NBC could see this wasn’t working. They fired Ramo.

Why’d they hire Ramo in the first place? Well, NBC’s coverage of the 2008 Olympic opening ceremonies got a Peabody Award and an Emmy for work by Ramo, Bob Costas, and Matt Lauer. That was in China – Ramo speaks Mandarin. He’s written a lot about China …but not about Korea.

Perhaps he told NBC that he was a skilled utterer of what Maureen Ryan of Variety called “endless generalities about what constituted ‘Asian’ culture.” Ryan cruelly said these generalities “felt about as deep as a Wikipedia entry,” but SorryWatch thinks that’s not fair to Wikipedia.

On a less insulting but also stupid note, Katie Couric babbled about the Dutch. Commenting on how well the Netherlandish athletes were doing in speed skating events, she burbled, “’Why are they so good?’ you may be asking… Because skating is an important mode of transportation in a city like Amsterdam which sits at sea level. As you all know, it has lots of canals that can freeze in the winters. So… the Dutch… [skate] on them to get from place to place, to race on them, and also to have fun.”

Rush hour begins.

Twitter had fun with that. Some expanded on the theme of Dutch commutes. “In summer us Dutch swim to work and grocery stores via the canals,” alleged Jos Duijvestein. Bernard suggested that they are aided in this by floating wooden shoes.

Others bragged about their own special national commutes. “We in Australia all use the Uber Kangaroo service to get from A to B,” alleged Sash Dordevic. “Yes and here in Canada we take the dog sled from our igloo home to our igloo office.”

But others took a darker view about Americans being “less bright about the rest of the world.” We wish we could deny it.

We were hoping Couric would apologize to the Dutch for her foolish imaginings, to viewers for telling them stuff that was wrong, and to Americans for making us LOOK LIKE CLUELESS DOPES.

Katie, this means YOU.

She tweeted congratulations to the Netherlands on their medal count, adding “My apologies for being on thin ice for my comments re: skating on canals. I was trying to salute your historical passion for the sport but it didn’t come out that way!”

Not great. If you mess up on air, you should apologize on air. She doesn’t exactly take responsibility for spreading nonsense with “it didn’t come out that way!” THIS IS HER JOB.

Couric has some unexamined childish vision of the Netherlands – Twitter was snide about her probable tulip-riddled windmill imagery. We wonder if she holds to the old belief in canals on Mars. Super cold there, so Martians could commute by skating. Will we see Martians at the next Winter Olympics?

When a small business places an advertisement, they usually hope to attract customers. Not hate mail, boycotts, hearings, subpoenas, and people digging into their past.

So ads should be carefully worded. And if a business owner is moved to make the copy more… dynamic, maybe they should reconsider that.

Suburban Express is a bus company running 3 large buses and half a dozen smaller ones, ferrying people from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana to Chicago.

Take a look at their recent email ad. We bet you can see the problem.

The other passengers don’t look like me.

Yes, you’re right. It’s bullet point 7: “People who look like you. You won’t feel like you’re in China when you’re on our buses.”

A lot of people didn’t care for that. The Illinois Attorney General’s office issued a subpoena, curious about whether Suburban Express might have violated the state Human Rights Act. The U of I condemned the ad. A student senator suggested banning the buses from the campus area. Five student organizations issued a statement calling the ad an act of racism, and urge students to file complaints

SorryWatch would like to point out that Bullet Point 7 doesn’t look like the other bullet points. It doesn’t have so many Capitalized Words like Fuzzy Slippers, and unlike the other bullet points, it has a period at the end. It’s as if another person added it after the ad was already composed. Or if not another person, another personality.

In response to the initial fury, Suburban Express followed up with this:

Apology

A little while ago, we sent out an email that has received some negative feedback.

We made a remark based on the fact that our competitor mostly handles Chinese international students. This remark is being interpreted as a slap in the face of all non-caucasians for some reason, and that it [sic] not how it was intended.

We must concede that we disagree with the way the University of Illinois is being run. U of I is a state school that is funded by taxpayers and is built on land granted by the people of the State of Illinois. As such, we believe that the mission of the University of Illinois should be providing high-quality, affordable education to the citizens of Illinois.

U of I mismanagement over the past few decades has put them in a financial bind. To solve the problem, they admit large numbers of international students who pay higher tuition. Nearly 20% of U of I students are natives of China, and this high percentage of nonnative english speakers places a variety of burdens on domestic students.

We agree that having a healthy mixture of different cultures and ethnicities is valuable. But we’re not comfortable with the idea of selling our university to the highest foreign bidder.

In any case, we did not intend to offend half the planet.

Regards,

Suburban Express

First of all, it’s not an apology, even though it’s headed “Apology.” It’s a rant about U of I policies, and how everybody misunderstood. They got negative feedback “for some reason.” Mysterious, because they never intended to offend “half the planet.” (Which phrase may or may not be a nasty suggestion that only people of Chinese descent were offended.) Secondly, it includes insinuations about unstated “burdens” placed on “domestic” students by international students.

I’m concerned that the people on this bus may not dress like me.

Lo! The “Apology” made things worse! One Chicago alderman, Ameya Pawar, posted it on Faceebook, commenting, “This is not an apology! This is an unbelievably offensive and bigoted response. Shame on you. Since you serve O’Hare International Airport, I am going to call for a hearing on your business practices. In them [sic] meantime, you may want to issue a real apology.”

Whoa! Okay, wow, okay!

Suburban Express tried again:

Suburban Express Email Apology

On December 2^nd 2017 Suburban Express sent out an email discount with offensive and inexcusable remarks concerning Chinese exchange students. It was incredibly inappropriate and harmful. We fully apologize and accept all responsibility for our actions. We have been made aware of the Illinois Attorney General’s investigation of our practices as well as Alderman Pawar’s call for a hearing. We are working to cooperate with both, and others, to fully respond to and rectify this situation. It is our company’s mission to provide safe, reliable, and fair transportation for all students. We will work endlessly to ensure this.

The initial comment made, “Passengers like you…you won’t feel like you’re in China when you’re on our buses.” was grotesquely xenophobic in nature. There is no benefit, by any measure, to excluding any demographic and we apologize for this indefensible statement. Further, the emailed apology which followed was also harmful insofar as it tried to excuse a wrongfully nationalist statement. The sarcastic tone and disagreement with the University of Illinois’ inclusive practices are just as offensive and wrong and we apologize with great shame.

We are looking forward to working with all students, organizations, and Illinois officials on this matter. Your responses as a community have inspired us as a company to not only expeditiously make amends, and appropriately apologize without excuse, but to relaunch our company’s conduct completely. Although we have never prevented any student of any demographic from boarding our bus simply because of race, religion, sexual orientation, gender orientation or nationality, the comments made have created the image that Chinese exchange students are not welcome, and we are striving to change this.

As the year concludes and a new year approaches, we invite all people to work with us and take this incident as an opportunity to get to know us as we work hard to reform our practices. We will strive to work swiftly and professionally to make amends and to adhere to the highest standards of conduct from this moment forward. We only hope you can trust this will never be repeated, and that we will only do better in the future with all students and customers. Thank you.

That’s a lot better. It reads as if someone sat the author down and told them exactly what they needed to do, so they said they’d do it. ‘You have to apologize fully. You have to take responsibility for what you said.’ ‘Okay! We fully apologize and accept all responsibility for our actions.’ But that’s okay.

Wherever this bus is going, I want to go.

We suspect some negotiation took place around the sentence “There is no benefit… to excluding any demographic…” Toeppen told one reporter that Suburban Express would never discriminate against PAYING CUSTOMERS. “I want every passenger I can get,” he said, and said most tickets are sold online, making discrimination “technologically impossible.” No, it’s not impossible, but we agree that it’s unlikely. What he actually did was to try using the demographic makeup of his customers as a xenophobic selling point. Which doesn’t seem to have paid off.

It’d also be nice if the part about their conduct relaunch didn’t sound quite so much like hype, but hey, maybe they’ll have a sale.

Meanwhile we’re pondering whether the strategy used in the initial response could work better in another setting. Nope. Writing a non-apology and following it with a zinger like “we did not intend to offend half the planet,” “I never meant to set off the crybabies,” or “I had no idea I’d enrage all womankind” does not work, even if you label it Apology in bold type.

Just a friendly hint.