Home furnishing retailer HomeSense is pulling a controversial laundry basket from its Canadian stores after Global News contacted the company for comment.
The hamper carries a prominent label that reads: “Laundry (for mom).”
It caught the attention of a Toronto shopper last week, who published a photo of it on a Facebook moms group, writing, “I love Homesense, but this is total bullsh*t.”
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The post caused a stir online, with several users interpreting the label as a suggestion that doing the laundry is — by default — mom’s job.
“Clearly the message here is Mom does the laundry,” wrote one person, who called it “monetizing a stereotype.”
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“Yep. Not in my house,” reads yet another comment, followed by the hashtag #partnersincrimeandlaundry.
Some wondered whether the basket was meant to hold mom’s laundry alone. After all, keeping that separate from her partner’s and from the often mud-stained, sand-filled clothes of small children might not be such a bad idea.
But the person who first uploaded the picture, who has asked Global News not to be named, said she didn’t see a similar hamper labelled “for dad” in the store.
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When contacted by Global News, The TJX Companies, which operates HomeSense as well as Winners and Marshalls in Canada, said it planned to take the hamper off the shelves at its Canadian locations.
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“It certainly was not our intention to cause any offense and we regret that this did. We will work to remove this item from our HomeSense stores in Canada,” Erika Tower, director of corporate communications at The TJX Companies, wrote in an emailed statement.
That was the right move, said Maureen Atkinson, senior partner at J.C. Williams Group, a retail adviser.
“When your customers are criticizing something, you fess up, you don’t defend it,” she said.
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While not everyone may find the label offensive, it did seem “a little over the top,” Atkinson told Global News.
“Some people obviously think this is part of the problem of gender stereotyping,” she added.
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Retailers have to become attuned to customers’ sensitivities about merchandise that, whether intentionally or unwittingly, appear to perpetuate gender roles, she noted.
The leap from merchandise labels to gender labels can be a short one, Sheryl Sandberg, author of the bestselling book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, has argued.
The Facebook chief operating officer has repeatedly pointed to T-shirts sold in the U.S., with the boys’ version reading “Smart Like Daddy,” and the girls’ version saying “Pretty like Mommy.”
“I would love to say that was 1951, but it was last year,” Sandberg said while speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in 2013. “As a woman becomes more successful, she is less liked, and as a man becomes more successful, he is more liked — and that starts with those T-shirts.”
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