Evri’s sloppy copy

Saw this Evri bag today and instantly spotted an apostrophe inconsistency — shortly followed by a comma splice.

There are three instances of the contraction “I’m” that all use a single smart quote (’) as the apostrophe. However, the first renders differently from the other two.

This reminds me of when I start constructing a social media post on my iPhone, and then later finish it on my MacBook.

IOS uses smart punctuation by default, whereas macOS doesn’t, so it’s easy to mix up smart quotes and straight quotes. Sure, it’s possible to change the settings for this, but given Apple prides itself on seamless cross-platform experiences, you might think it’d be the same out of the box.

But none of the ones on this bag are straight quotes. Therefore, I imagine copying and pasting between different systems might be to blame, as this can lead to subtle font substitution or character normalisation.

As for the other issue, a comma has been used to incorrectly join two independent clauses — this is called a comma splice. A conjunction after the comma or a full stop instead would have been correct.

Nevertheless, the whole copy is a bit verbose anyway. They should have gone with:

Hello, I’m special!
Made from up to 79% recycled materials.
Reusable. Recyclable.

They could have even stripped it back completely:

This bag is reusable and recyclable.

Or just:

Reusable/recyclable

These mistakes are just the tip of the iceberg, though, given Evri consistently performs poorly for customer satisfaction across UK delivery companies.

When will they learn?