An embarrassed government education department in Taiwan had to issue an apology in regard to piggy banks it had given some children.
According to a report in The China Post, the mayor of New Taipei City held a “summit” for elementary school students on April 29th “to promote financial responsibility and planning for their future”.
To emphasize and help promote these goals, each student was given a new piggy bank.
These were high-tech electronic piggy banks which were calibrated to automatically identify and calculate the total amount of money being deposited.
A problem arose, however, when some of the parents attending the event noticed that the boxes in which the piggy banks were packaged had instructions written in “simplified” Chinese, which is used in mainland China, as opposed to the traditional Chinese characters still used in Taiwan.
But even more embarrassing was that the instructions stated the piggy banks were “for depositing coins that circulate in mainland China”!
This surely was not the “planning for the future” the Taiwan mayor had intended.
As it turned out, the piggy banks were built at a factory in mainland China that is owned by a Taiwanese business. In the rush to ship the piggy banks in time for the meeting, the wrong packaging was used.