Costco water bottles wrongly branded UNCG as an HBCU

Jun 01, 2023

Marcus Brandon didn't need a cup of coffee to get him started on Thursday morning. It was a photo that opened his eyes as well as those of N.C. A&T alumni.

On an alumni page was posted a photo taken at Costco in Greensboro that showed a water bottle with the UNCG logo on it. On the opposite side of the bottle was printed "HBCU Pride." There are two HBCUs in Greensboro, but UNCG is not the third.

Suffice it to say, Aggie Pride was on full display on social media, but Brandon, a former Guilford County state representative, took it to the next level.

"So it was circulating around Facebook a lot. It was on an A&T alumni page," Brandon said. "So I just took the initiative to call Costco and let them know that that was not acceptable. I called early and (the manager) assured me that they would all come off the floor. I live on Friendly (Avenue), so I just truck it on down there just to make sure because I also have a Costco membership and they were all gone ... but when I got there, the A&T cups are still there."

They were there, but not for long. A visitor finally found the A&T bottles toward the back of the store on Wendover Avenue near Interstate 40. But a second run at the aisle where they were located showed those bottles had been taken down.

A different Costco manager than the one Brandon spoke to declined to comment, and Costco's media relations department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

By then, however, it was too late to soothe Aggie nerves. There were at least 150 shares of the photo posted, and a UNCG student posted a video to TikTok with another illustration of the UNCG bottle.

UNCG issued a statement on Friday apologizing for the error, explaining what happened and that it has respect for HBCUs.

"We have worked with our contracted production and retail vendors to remove the water bottles from the retail store and production lines," the statement said. "Along with UNCG’s water bottle, the contracted design team was creating several HBCU ones and inadvertently combined certain design elements."

The manufacturer, Logo Brands, didn't immediately respond on Friday to a request for comment.

An A&T spokeswoman said on Friday that the school would have no comment.

Amy Chantelle Crawford of Greensboro went through a range of emotions after seeing a photo of the UNCG bottle, which she shared on her Facebook page.

"Initially, I was confused. It took me a moment to realize what I was seeing," Crawford said. "Then I found it to be quite comical because we have seen how certain people have used our images in the past to profit from it."

There's an undercurrent to the mistake. There have always been concerns among the A&T faithful that there would be an effort to merge the two schools, a worry that initially manifested itself when UNCG changed its primary school color from green to blue, matching the Aggie scheme. The bottle mistake fanned that flame again.

Brandon remembers how his father reacted when he saw that UNCG has changed its colors on a water tower.

"I remember when I was a kid riding down the street and my dad slamming on the brakes, and go into the payphone and calling people once he realized that UNCG tower changed from green and gold to blue and gold," he said. "So, we have some trauma on this."

A spokesman for the UNC System said on Friday that there is no such merger in the works.

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