A Milwaukee-based spice company is pleading with customers to buy gift cards after a recent promotion declaring that “Republicans are racist” backfired spectacularly.
Penzey’s Spices used Martin Luther King Jr. Day to peddle their goods and besmirch Republicans. The spice company held a “Republicans are Racist Weekend” sale, which they promised to “cheese off racists.” The spice company also offered Black Lives Matter stickers with every purchase during MLK weekend.
The company’s owner sent an email to their customers that stated, “Remember how Republicans did all they could to derail that success by trying to drown out BLM’s message with shouts of all lives matter, and blue lives matter, and lying about the leaders of BLM being Marxists and Communists?”
In a 2015 interview, Black Lives Matter Global Network co-founder Patrisse Cullors openly admitted that she and fellow BLM co-founder Alicia Garza are “trained Marxists.”
The email from the spice company continued to make unsubstantiated claims, even claiming that Republicans want to shoot black Americans.
“Remember how Republicans, going against a mountain of evidence to the contrary, once again lied and said BLM wasn’t a peaceful movement but instead terrorists inciting violence throughout the country and then raced out to buy a crapload of guns because maybe they were finally going to get their chance to shoot a Black person? What a bunch of racists,” the email says.
Penzey’s CEO Bill Penzey claimed that the Republican Party “does everything it can to make it harder for Black people to vote.”
“The Racist label is one you will deservingly wear every day you stand with them,” Penzey said to Republican supporters who had signed up to get email updates from the spice company. “Get used to it, or maybe instead, become a better person.”
Penzey ends the email by using his liberal beliefs to get people to sign up for emails from the spice company, “If you believe in vaccines, all the goodness set in motion each time we say Black Lives Matter, and knocking on every door possible before 11.8.22 to turn out every last vote to save our democracy, we would be better off with you on our mailing list.”
The polarizing email caused numerous past customers of Penzey’s Spices to ditch the preachy spice purveyor.
Penzey admitted that the “Republicans are Racists” email cost his business 40,005 subscribers to the email subscription. He claimed that the email brought in 30,000 new subscribers, but acknowledged, “We are still down about 10,000. Please help.”
To try to cope with the lost customers, Penzey’s started a gift card sale “with the hope this might make it a bit easier for you to share some and possibly get a few good new customers to replace the ones we’ve lost,” according to 1130 WISN.
“After starting the year with All Republicans are Republicans and following up with Republicans are Racists we’ve set a nice little Boycott Penzeys! surge in motion,” Penzey said in an email to customers on Friday. “It certainly wasn’t unexpected, but if it’s within your means, you picking up a small stack of Gift Cards would help.”
Penzey once again attempted to sell spices by broadcasting his progressive political stances.
“If you can’t even begin to fathom how to ‘compromise’ with January 6th, or the Republican vaccine lies needlessly killing 10,000 Americans every week, if you have no desire to become half-way racist, and if their intent to destroy our climate for one thousand years to come doesn’t have you asking: ‘What if we just destroyed it for five-hundred years instead?’ we would be better off with you on this Voice Of Cooking email list,” Penzey states.
In 2019, Penzey’s spices “spent more than $700,000 on Facebook ads promoting impeachment, at one point spending more than anyone but Trump’s reelection campaign, according to data compiled by the marketing firm Bully Pulpit Interactive that was first reported by Axios,” according to the Los Angeles Times.