Aldi agrees to change 'offensive' paint name after complaint

[dutchman]

Aldi has said it will change the name of a paint sold in its stores after it was branded ‘offensive’.

An angry customer contacted the Telegraph after coming across the gloss in the supermarket on Radford Road , in Coventry .

The product is labelled up as ‘rape yellow’ - something which caused upset to the woman who said she had been the victim of a serious sexual assault in the past.

Aldi explained that the paint is named after rapeseed - a crop which has a yellow colour. But the woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, insists that is an offensive label.

The customer, in her 50s, was out shopping with her son when she saw the paint on a special offer stand.

She said: “I looked at the paint and thought it can’t possibly say that, you have got to be kidding me, there’s no way they would sell that. I started choking.

“I got straight out of there. I was furious and upset.

“I thought maybe I was being sensitive because of my situation, but I sent pictures to my friends and they were all shocked by it. They couldn’t believe what I was saying.

“I contacted Aldi afterwards and they just assumed I was being sensitive because I was a rape victim.”

The one litre tins of quick-drying gloss are for sale at £4.99 and the colour is listed online as ‘Rapeseed yellow’. But the lids of the tins in store carry the label ‘rape yellow’.

Aldi has now agreed to change the name of the paint on its tins after the Telegraph raised the woman’s concerns with the supermarket.

A statement said: “This paint is a colour widely referred to in the industry as ‘RAL 1021 Rape Yellow’, which refers to rapeseed.

“The colour name will be altered to rapeseed yellow for all future production of this paint.”

But the customer said the product should never have reached the shelves.

She said: “How the hell did it get out with that name in the first place?

“You wouldn’t sell something called abortion red or poo brown. To me it’s the same thing, it’s offensive.

“It is a word that is a problem. How many other words can you think of for yellow without using that one?”

[rebbonk]

I wonder how many complaints they've had about this? I can't see a major chain changing the name of a product for one complaint.

[dutchman]

Bought two tins of exterior gloss from Aldi myself today:

Spoiler:

Aryan White and Swastika Black!