A PR person with Circuit City wrote the following letter to The Consumerist apologizing for the "thin skin" of one of their corporate people, and have since ordered the magazine back on the shelf.
Hi, Ben,
I spotted the article about Circuit City and MAD Magazine on your
site.
fyi, I became aware of this "situation" only this morning, and I have sent
a note today to the Editors of MAD Magazine.
Speaking as "an embarrassed corporate PR Guy," I apologized for the
fact that some overly-sensitive souls at our corporate headquarters ordered the
removal of the August issue of MAD Magazine from our stores. Please keep in mind
that only 40 of our 700 stores sell magazines at all.
The parody of our newspaper ad in the August MAD was very clever. Most
of us at Circuit City share a rich sense of humor and irony...but there are
occasional temporary lapses.
We apologize for the knee-jerk reaction, and have issued a retraction
order; the affected stores are being directed to put the magazines back on
sale.
As a gesture of our apology and deep respect for the folks at MAD
Magazine, we are creating a cross-departmental task force to study the
importance of humor in the corporate workplace and expect the resulting
Powerpoint presentation to top out at least 300 pages, chock full of charts,
graphs and company action plans.
In addition I have offered to send the MAD Magazine Editor a $20.00
Circuit City Gift Card, toward the purchase of a Nintendo Wii....if he can find
one!
All the best,Jim Babb
Corporate Communications
Circuit City Stores, Inc.
Richmond, VA
I would have put this as an update in the original post, but from where I am typing this it's not letting me go in to do that. But it's great that their PR person got in touch with The Consumerist and let them know that they were going to correct the issue.
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