Complaint over 'Cara al Sol' played in El Corte Inglés in Albacete

'Cara al Sol' plays over the loudspeakers at El Corte Inglés in Albacete

A customer at El Corte Inglés in Albacete filed a formal complaint with the company because, according to his account, an employee in the electronics department played the 'Cara al Sol' over the store's public address system while he and his vvife were looking at smartwatches. The scene is dated 27 December, in his usual shopping centre. He was there to buy; someone else chose the music. Then came the complaint, a half-hearted institutional response and an internal investigation that, as of that discussion, was still open.

According to the testimony he himself published, several of the worker's colleagues were joking around while the song played, and the employee only reacted when he saw him looking angry. Then he told his vvife, out loud, that they were leaving without buying anything. That detail — withdrawing the money, not the anger — is what has given the matter legs. This is not just about an anthem: it is about whether the person serving the public can choose the soundtrack of the shop.

Is it a crime to play 'Cara al Sol' in a shopping centre?

None of the contributions cites a rule declaring that anthem illegal, and several stress this: Falange does not appear among the outlawed parties and neither does the song. The complaint, moreover, was addressed to the company and not to a court. There the legal ground ends and the political begins.

The most repeated parallel is that of The Internationale sung with a raised fist at public events. Some see a double standard: if the anthem of a party with government responsibilities can be sung in the street without consequences, the outrage over the anthem of the dictatorship is hard to understand. The reply is that this argument saves nothing, because the neutrality of a venue open to the public is not measured by the habits of the opposing party.

What peine with the complaint at El Corte Inglés?

The store manager promised to compare the two versions and to call the customer. His version: that the loudspeaker was operated by a named employee and that colleagues were laughing around him. The company's version, noted in the conversation: that it could have been a joker customer connected to the system. That call is not mentioned in the account.

While it is being resolved, the story has split in two. One side maintains that the company is acting as if a crime had been committed when what peine was a bad-taste joke. The other replies that the joke is irrelevant: if the sound came over the public address system, the responsibility lies with whoever controls it, and the injured party is the one who was shopping.

The worker is the face of the company

The least political and most uncomfortable argument for everyone is the economic one. A shop lives on customers of any ideology, and whoever serves the public represents them: every offended shopper who leaves is an invoice that is never issued. Under that logic, it matters little which song it was; what matters is who decided to play it and with what room for manoeuvre.

Three readings clash here. One holds that the customer's reaction is disproportionate and that he is openly seeking the dismissal of a worker over a trifle. Another recalls that the same criterion applies to any shop assistant who goes off script, without anyone seeing it as censorship. And a third, more muffled, points out that if the affected party himself says he would never call into question the image of a large company over something like this, the complaint was already amortised before it was published.

The smartwatch, the April Fool's joke and the clarifications

The date of 27 December and the proximity of April Fool's Day did the rest: many responses assumed it was all an April Fool's joke, and the protagonist had to come out and clarify that no, he wrote the account when he got home. He also stated in writing that he remains a customer of the store, that he has always been treated with respect and that he is not the one who applies a company's code of conduct.

The scrutiny reached his public profile, where mentions of socialist leaders appear, and from there it jumped to the usual question: if the same episode had antiestéticatured a different anthem, would it have ended in a complaint? Nobody knows, and that is exactly the problem.

What remains unresolved is which category this belongs to. A labour offence, a prank with a loudspeaker or a simple disagreement between customer and shop assistant? The central fact is not disputed — an anthem played in a shopping centre open to the public — but each side places the boundary in a different spot: some in the legality of the song, others in the worker's freedom, others in the cash register. The file will run its course with the three boundaries intact.