A New York City-based soup chain landed in hot water when an email blast using the C-word was sent out to those on the company's mailing list.
Hale and Hearty's C-word email was certainly not supposed to be crude or offensive. The chain just wanted to offer its devoted customers a free cup of soup to celebrate a new location in Livingston, N.J.
The unfortunate email sent Tuesday morning, but dated 2008, reads as follows (via Gothamist)
On Wednesday, January 30, 2008 we will celebrate the opening of our Livingston, NJ location by inviting all our loyal Hale and Hearty customers as well as your friends and family to enjoy a free cup of soup at our newest location at 464 West Mount Pleasant Avenue, Livingston, NJ. As an added bonus: Mary- you know the cunt from 47th street- will serve you personally in any manner you choose. so cum one and all to our new location at 464 West Mount Pleasant Avenue, Livingston, NJ.
The email concludes with Hale and Hearty asking recipients to forward the email to "any of your friends or family who live or work in the area around Livingston," notes Gawker.
Hale and Hearty received the heads-up about its C-word email from Twitter users.
@stonecldfaux We are looking into the issue.. thanks for bringing this to our attention
— Hale and Hearty (@HaleandHeartyNY) October 23, 2012
@abellelife Thanks, we are currently looking into it and sincerely apologize..
— Hale and Hearty (@HaleandHeartyNY) October 23, 2012
Other concerned customers took to the cafe chain's Facebook page to find out what happened.
"Can you please explain to me what happened? I hope you can make this right and care enough about my business to show that this kind of foul language will not be tolerated," wrote one Hale and Hearty fan. The restaurant responded saying the issue is currently being looked into, but made sure to insist that "none of your personal information was tampered with during this unfortunate event."
Gawker reported that Hale and Hearty CEO Simon Jacobs sent out an apology email Tuesday afternoon, saying that the company believes the "email system may have been tampered with - however, we have enlisted our IT team to resolve the issue and make sure that your email addresses stay secure within our system."
UPDATE: Simon Jacobs got in touch with HuffPost regarding the C-word email and offered the following response:
From our preliminary investigation, it appears that someone obtained the username and PW for our daily email system at one specific H&H location (47th and Madison) and modified an old email to make it obscene and then sent it to that store’s email subscriber list.
We have changed the password and believe that this will ensure this does not happen again.
We greatly regret the incident and will be reviewing all our email security to make sure something like this doesn’t happen again in future.
We have no further information at this time.
(Photo courtesy of Instagram user kangalex.)
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