If there’s one trend we’d like to kill deader than the Harlem Shake, it’s “Keep Calm and Carry On”. Now comes news that will hopefully mark the end of this meme: Amazon is in a big pot of extra-hot PR water after briefly carrying a series of T-shirts bearing charming slogans like “Keep Calm and Hit Her”, “Keep Calm and Knife Her” and the winner, “Keep Calm and Rape a Lot.”

We think we speak for everyone when we say “Yikes.”

Here’s the dish: over the weekend, said shirts appeared on the site via a super classy Australian third-party retailer known as Solid Gold Bomb which has partnered with Amazon in the past. A public uproar quickly followed, with Britain’s shadow culture secretary calling on Amazon to make an immediate and “substantial” donation to a refuge for abused women. Amazon quickly removed the pages, but as you can see from the image above, screenshots live forever..

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Here’s a controversy that isn’t quite as blatant and ridiculous as the one surrounding Anthropologie‘s super-racist candlestick but still serves as an interesting case study in badly planned promotional campaigns.

The National Entertainment Collectibles Assocation (NECA), a company that makes toy lines based on film properties, recently decided to pull a line of action figures based on Quentin Tarantino‘s current spaghetti western/slave revolt blockbuster Django Unchained. Why? Because most of the black characters are slaves–and some of the white ones are slave masters. This didn’t sit so well with some.

We haven’t seen the movie and we don’t want to get into the debate over the film’s very liberal use of “the n-word”, but we are a little baffled by the very concept of toy lines from a Tarantino film (though we wouldn’t mind having a little 7-inch version of Tim Roth’s Reservoir Dogs character on our desk).

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Oh wow. We absolutely can’t believe the folks at Anthropologie didn’t see this backlash coming. Seriously, just look at this damn thing:

We almost want to congratulate the company: it’s pretty hard to offend two huge groups of potential customers with a single item while calling it “whimsical” and pricing it at 400 bucks.

Anthropologie apparently removed the offending stick from its site after thousands of Twitter messages and emails decried it as the racist knicknack that it so obviously is.

…and here’s the inevitable response from the retailer’s PR director:

“An independent artisan makes these one-of-a-kind candlesticks from vintage ceramics. Unfortunately two that we received included extremely inappropriate figurines, and we have removed them from our website. We sincerely regret the offense we have caused.”

Yeah OK, but we know how retail works–somebody approved this thing for sale, entered it into the system, wrote a copy block describing it, etc. The question barely needs to be asked: WHY?!?