BEFORE YOU GO
RETAIL RANDOMS
Apostrophe catastrophe
My goodness, the sound of tut-tutting must have drowned out the one o’clock
If you fancy yourself as a forecourt operator but are worried you might make a fuel of yourself, you’ll be pleased to discover Gas Station Simulator. If you’re wondering what gas has to do with forecourts, it’s what our American cousins mistakenly call that well-known liquid, petrol. The game’s blurb says: “Buy an abandoned gas station and restore it to its full glory. Renovate, upgrade and expand upon the offered services to keep up with your clients demands.” Sounds great. Shame about that apostrophe missing from the end of
gun when residents in the well-heeled Bruntsfield area of Edinburgh discovered
Life’s a gas ‘clients’ though. One imagines there’s an in-game option to boost trade by opening a Sainsburys,Local at some stage.
that their Sainsbury’s Local had been rebranded as Sainsburys,Local. Getting an apostrophe in the wrong place is bad enough, if depressingly commonplace, but using one as a comma beggars belief. Just what are they teaching them at sign erectors’ college these days? One can only assume the poor chap or chapess responsible didn’t have a long enough ladder to get the pesky piece of punctuation in the proper position. To compound its misery, the supermarket giant responded to a tweet pointing out its error by asking the eagle-eyed sender to confirm the store’s location. This despite the tweet clearly stating it was sent from Edinburgh, Scotland (not Edinburgh’ Scotland) and including a picture of the offending store with a ‘Bruntsfield Gardens’ street sign clearly visible. Footfall at the Waitrose branch in nearby Morningside is understood to have doubled in the wake of the howler.
Despite the bad grammar, it sounds like there are worse things to blow £15.49 on. Commenting on pcgamer.com’s forum, a player named Roobarb said: “It’s a solid game and one of the top surprise fun times of the year for me,” before giving it a well impressive 85% out of 10. Eighty-five per cent out of 10? What are they teaching kids in maths these days?
WEDNESDAY 22ND SEPTEMBER 2021 / ISSUE 74 / SLRMAG.CO.UK / 33
