A disgusted mother is boycotting high street chemist Boots after she found her children playing with a sex toy near the checkouts.
Alison Savory wrote to Boots chief executive Alex Gourlay after her sons, aged six and eight, picked up a purple Durex vibrator displayed ‘prominently’ in the store.
The mother-of-three, from Crowthorne, Berkshire, said: ‘Call me a prude, but it is not something children should be exposed to. ‘Boots presents a family image – since when did it turn into Ann Summers?’
Ms Savory, an acupuncturist, let her sons wait near the tills at the Camberley store while paying for her shopping with her two-year-old daughter on December 23.
She said: ‘I don’t choose to take my children into a sex shop, but in a family shop I felt happy for the children to run around.’
The 42-year-old was ‘flabbergasted’ and ’embarrassed’ when she found them playing with the penis-shaped toy displayed at their eye level by a wall of condoms next to the till. She said ‘I wasn’t ready to have that conversation in the middle of a busy Boots – I was very embarrassed.
‘I felt Boots took my choice away as a parent and that upset me.’
Ms Savory‘s letter asked the chief executive to consider the ‘early sexualisation’ of children in a world where their ‘innocence and lives are already bombarded with inappropriate images’.
She wrote to say she was ‘deeply disappointed’ a family company was contributing to the ‘erosion’ and urged him to consider whether the products and product placement were appropriate.