Target's Boston Pride Shirts Are Pretty Messed Up

If a company plans to help customers showcase their "local pride," said company should probably have some basic local knowledge. That might not have been the case with Target, whose series of flawed, Boston-themed T-shirts came under attack this week. A Twitter user was among the first to draw attention to numerous misspellings (Jamaica Plain is Jamaca Plain, for instance) on one shirt displaying a map of Boston neighborhoods, but that was just the beginning. The shirt also omitted the Mission Hill neighborhood and replaced Chinatown, Downtown, and a few other neighborhoods with a single non-existent one dubbed "Central," reports Boston.com. Perhaps worst of all, it spelled Southie as Southy, notes Boston.com.

Misspellings were also found on two other Boston neighborhood shirts in Target's "Local Pride" line. One even mentions Cambridge, which is its own city across the Charles River from Boston, reports the Boston Globe. A rep for Target says all of the "incorrect Boston items" will now be removed from Target stores and its website. "We apologize for any disappointment that this may have caused," the rep says, adding, "We love to be able to carry products that are reflective of the local community." This isn't Target's first misstep with Bostonians. In 2015, it drew flak for asking a New York artist to design Boston-themed shirts, per the Globe, which found that one of the shirts that came out of that partnership has, yes, a typo on it. (Under Armour yanked a shirt that drew on the famous Iwo Jima image.)