It is traditional for businesses to post a sign with some form of holiday greeting. They typically offer some sort of warm sentiment, or an ad about a special pricing available during the holidays, but HSBC took a different approach, threatening patrons right at the door.
James Ball, an editor at The Guardian spotted the sign above in a London branch of HSBC which reads “Christmas. Home made. Thanks to over 100,000 of you who trusted us with your mortgages this year. Your home may be repossessed if you do not keep up repayments on your mortgage.”
Pay up or Christmas is cancelled
That’s some serious scrooge behavior right there. Ball tweeted a picture of the sign:
Merry Christmas, though!
“Although we realize it doesn’t look very festive, it is a legal requirement to have these words on all our U.K. mortgage adverts, and for them to be easily noticeable,” Neil Brazil, an HSBC spokesman, told Huffington Post in response.
It seems to be that it would have sufficed to have the statement with the other fine print at the bottom rather than as a subtitle to the broader “Merry Christmas” sentiment.
So what we see is a thoughtless case of foot-in-mouth disease, but truly – HSBC thanks you for your business, but if you miss your payments, they’re relatively enthusiastic about their power to foreclose. Merry Christmas, though!
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