Sears Holdings (SHLD) Apologizes for Swastika Item

Sears Holdings (NASDAQ: SHLD) apologized for items listed earlier on Sears Marketplace, according to a Blog post. The company said the offensive item, reportedly a swastika ring, was from an independent third-party seller. The company said they are "outraged."

Full Post:

Like many who have connected with our company, we are outraged that more than one of our independent third-party sellers posted offensive items on Sears Marketplace. We sincerely apologize that these items were posted to our site and want you to know that the ring was not posted by Sears, but by independent third-party vendors.

When we became aware of the existence of these offensive items, we immediately prevented the items from being purchased on the site and then proceeded to remove them from the site yesterday (October 13, 2014). We are also in the process of removing related, offensive items from our site.

All Marketplace Sellers must accept our seller agreement terms in order to sell their items on sears.com, that allow us to remove anything offensive. We promptly contacted the Sellers to strongly voice our concern over their incredible lack of judgment.

We take this issue very seriously and are taking the appropriate steps, as we communicated to the Anti-Defamation League. A representative from the ADL applauded Sears for taking swift action, telling media outlets: “They took the situation very seriously. They took immediate steps to remove the items from their website,” Joshua Cohen said. “ADL feels that Sears did the right thing,” he said. “Such is the nature of the Internet that anything goes. We’re glad that Sears took this situation seriously and took immediate steps to remove these items from their site.”

We also want you to know that we are working to improve our systems to prevent such items from being listed by independent third-party sellers.

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