VORDINGBORG, Denmark — A Danish supermarket chain has pulled a line of flip-flops that featured images of Jesus and the Virgin Mary after several churches protested and angry customers ransacked the “flip-flops of shame.”
The Coop chain, which owns the Kvickly stores where the sandals were sold, said it originally thought the footwear was trendy.
“It was never our intention to offend people’s beliefs, but apparently that was the case, and we were surprised by the scale of these protests,” company spokesman Jens Juul Nielsen told the Agence France-Presse news agency. “That is why we have chosen to remove them from the shelves.”
Danish Catholics and the state Lutheran Protestant Church complained to the store about the $6 flip-flops. “We Catholics pray to Jesus and Mary and now they want us to walk all over them. That’s blasphemy and a serious and indecent violation of the religious sentiments of believers,” said Johannes Gram Kulis, a church official from Vordingborg.
Coop officials, who were originally reluctant to pull the flip-flops, said they sold about 4,000 pairs of the sandals before they were pulled. The shoes are now said to be worth double their original value.
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