(WOMENSENEWS)–JC Penney’s department stores are touting their undergarments with topless models that some shoppers say advertise more than just lingerie.
The campaign features one 25- by 36-inch poster of a woman wearing only panties with her arms crossed over her bare breasts and another poster of a woman’s bare back with a thong riding clear above her low-slung jeans.
The ads didn’t play in Peoria. Customers in the Illinois town, led by irate mother of three Karen Moser, complained.
“How am I supposed to get my sons past these posters?” Moser griped in an Oct. 2 article in the Peoria Journal Star. “I thought JC Penney was a place our family could shop.”
Store manager Tom Tour says he called corporate headquarters in Dallas and was told that the ads, which were created especially for JC Penney and are distributed to its 1,068 stores nationally, were acceptable. But “in my eyes, they were not how I wanted our store to be portrayed,” Tour said, so he removed the posters this past week.
That wasn’t good enough for Moser, who returned her back-to-school purchases totaling almost $350 and shopped elsewhere.
The posters are still being used corporately. The main office explains that the “in-house graphics are one of our ongoing ways to promote certain fashions,” according to JC Penney spokesman Quinton Crenshaw.
“We’ll pull a graphic down if we get too many customers that complain about it,” he said Friday. “Of course we always take their point of view seriously, but we have no plans of taking (the posters) down everywhere.”
–Julie Leupold
