Last Saturday, the high-street chain Paperchase ran a promotion in the Daily Mail offering two free rolls of wrapping paper. Nothing objectionable about that, you might think, even if the design was migraine-inducingly awful. I have lost count of the number of times I have been dragged into this ghastly emporium by my daughter on a weekend in pursuit of some over-priced piece of tat. Not recommended if you are nursing a hangover.
Later that day, the left-wing lobby group Stop Funding Hate launched a fusillade against Paperchase on Twitter for having the temerity to advertise in Britain’s second-best-selling daily newspaper. ‘Is a Daily Mail promotion what customers want to see from @FromPaperchase?’ it asked. The answer was presumably ‘no’ because Stop Funding Hate’s reason for existence is to bully large retailers into withdrawing their ads from right-of-centre tabloid newspapers in the hope of destroying our free press.
Paperchase responded by tweeting a request for its customers’ views, at which point hundreds of hashtag activists piled in, castigating the company for thoughtlessly advertising in a newspaper with a paid circulation of 1.4 million and a readership of four million. What was Paperchase thinking? After this forensic scientific poll, Paperchase then issued a statement apologising for its appalling error: ‘We’ve listened to you about this weekend’s newspaper promotion. We now know we were wrong to do this — we’re truly sorry and we won’t ever do it again. We apologise if we have let you down. Lesson learnt.’
It is hard to know where to begin with this one. Is the chief executive of Paperchase really so dim that he thinks a handful of Corbynista trolls on Twitter are representative of his entire customer base? If I were a shareholder I would question the judgment of an executive who risks alienating four million potential customers in order to placate a few bug-eyed fanatics whose idea of an ‘amusing’ gift would be a pencil case bearing the legend ‘Theresa May, Jeremy Will’.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in