FamilyMart has come under fire after customers saw the convenience store chain charging double the normal price of water during a crisis that kicked off the new year in Japan.
Here’s a photo shared by a user on X:
However, it didn’t take long for the post to get a community note saying that FamilyMart had already acknowledged the error and that it wasn’t done as a means of profit.
According to a statement from FamilyMart, the case of 12 bottles of ‘Miyazaki Prefecture Kirishima Natural Water,’ normally costs 1,788 yen, which was erroneously listed as 3,576 yen, the price for the case of 24 bottles.
While FamilyMart apologized for the issue explaining that the pricing was made in error, most people weren’t buying the excuse from corporate as the damage had already been done.
oof, now I’m getting flashbacks to the toilet paper and mask hoarding/flipping during the start of the pandemic…
Community notes quickly turned into a damage control tool rather than straightening up facts tool
Oy vey!
When you made an “Error” this huge on the Internet, simply issue an “apologize” won’t cut it.
Good PR manager would immediately made announcement to donate all available water in store to the neighborhood, or at lease sold ’em 50% off in area affected by the disaster most. This is how you turn a PR crisis around and win back some good faith.
This is literally a mission in Disaster Report 4. Since the game itself is pretty tongue in cheek and humorous it plays it off as a joke, but here we are.
In time of natural disaster the easiest thing to distribute is money. Profiteering laws ignore this reality and end up causing avoidable shortages.