GS25's camping poster showed a hand pinching a sausage — Korea read a hidden insult

On 1 May 2021, GS25, South Korea's largest convenience-store chain, posted its first promotional poster for a line of camping goods on social media, planning to run it for a month. The drawing showed a hand picking up a Vienna sausage with a pinching gesture, thumb and forefinger close together. Within a day, customers on men's online communities said the gesture copied the logo of Megalia, a radical feminist site that had shut in 2017, and was meant to mock the size of male genitalia.

The reading spread, and the sausage only fed it. Critics then argued that the poster's English tagline, 'Emotional Camping Must-have Item,' hid the Korean slang for Megalia if its last letters were read backwards. GS25 scrubbed the disputed images and posted a revised version — but the new image of a moon and three stars was itself read as a feminist symbol, this time of a Seoul National University group. Each fix produced a fresh accusation.

GS25 removed the moon and stars, then took the poster down altogether, and launched an internal probe. Its chief executive, Cho Yoon-sung, later apologised and promised measures to stop it happening again. The episode also drew the opposite complaint: women's online communities accused the chain of caving to male pressure. A camping-goods promotion had become a proxy for the country's wider argument over gender, and the brand could not satisfy either side.