I don’t think we’ve ever had such a dire story involving Kohl’s department stores before, or even mentioning Kohl’s at all. But there’s a T-shirt for sale at Kohl’s as we speak that appears to have been deliberately designed to ignite a powder keg of truck-based tension and hostility. Is this a mistake, or a cunning act of sabotage? We may never know, but we can at least take this moment to plead for a peaceful resolution. What’s on the shirt? A truck. A truck that has the potential to ignite thousands of brutal Ford vs. Chevy fights.
The shirt was spotted by Mike, at a Cleveland-area Kohl’s. The official Kohl’s site shows the women’s shirt for sale with the unassuming name “Junior’s American Pie Short Sleeve Crew Neck Americana Tee:”
Okay, at first glance, the shirt appears fairly harmless, and the suggestion on the site that one could “chill out this summer in this vintage Americana short sleeve tee” seems at least possible for the determined wearer.
The shirt references the famous Don McLean song “American Pie” specifically the chorus lyrics that state
“Bye, bye Miss American Pie
Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry
Them good ole boys were drinking whiskey and rye
And singin’ this’ll be the day that I die
This’ll be the day that I die”
... and, to illustrate, there’s a truck there, which is clearly labeled a Chevy.
Let’s take a closer look at that truck:
Wait a minute. That body is definitely from a Chevrolet truck, no question. It looks like something around a ‘65 or so:
But that front end, the grille, the face of the truck, that doesn’t look quite right. I think I know why. Because that front end is from another truck. This truck:
Yes, the face of the truck on that sassy Junior’s Tee is from a Ford F-150, looks like a 1976 or so. A Ford face. On a Chevy truck.
The only people who are likely to notice this are people who really care about Ford and Chevy trucks, and those are precisely the people who will find this deeply offensive, because of the thousands-of-years-old Ford vs. Chevy rivalry.
This is a rivalry that quite recently broke out in a knife-and-gunfight within a family; imagine what could happen in the crucible of emotion that is a Kohl’s?
To give an analogy for the power of the wrongness of this image, it would be the equivalent of putting this on a T-shirt you were selling as a Junior’s Star Trek Short Sleeve Crew Neck Sci-Fi Tee:
See what I mean? Right body, face from the nemesis means big trouble.
I urge Kohl’s to pull these shirts from shelves and their websites immediately before the scale of this fuck-up is realized and Kohl’s locations around the country become battlegrounds for incensed and humiliated Chevy truck fans, and the Ford owners who will be there to taunt them and escalate the situation.
Please, everyone, try to remain calm. Together, we can get through this.