Last week, we quizzed readers on the correct way to write the names of several retail businesses that abuse or play with punctuation. An awful lot of you gave it a shot and some of you did very well, but the results show that there is a lot of confusion out there for some of the country’s biggest retail brands.

The median score for the quiz was only around 40%, meaning that most quiz-takers were confused by a majority of the brand names.

In fact, only three brand names were identified by more than 50% of those taking the quiz: Walgreens (65%); Wegmans (64%); and hotel chain Loews (56%).

The positive result for Loews might explain the overwhelmingly poor results for home-improvement chain Lowe’s, which only 30% of people chose. More than twice as many people (62%) incorrectly selected the apostrophe-free “Lowes.”

Walmart’s many attempts to tweak its name — combined with the hyphenated corporate version of the name that the financial press insists on using — resulted in widespread confusion among quiz-takers:

While the correct “Walmart” did end up being the most frequently selected answer, it still only represented 36% of all responses to this question, making it the second-lowest score in the entire quiz. And the asterisked “Wal*Mart” was only a percentage point behind at 35%, followed very closely by “Wal-Mart,” which the company still uses for corporate dealings but which it no longer uses in its marketing or advertising.

Also scoring only 36% was the non-possessive “Tim Hortons,” which lost out to the incorrect (but more logical) “Tim Horton’s” (53%). This can be partly chalked up to the fact that the donut and coffee chain is primarily a Canadian operation, and partly to the fact that it just doesn’t make much sense.

Likewise, only 42% of people know that Popeyes lacks an apostrophe, which makes us wonder why the fried chicken chain just doesn’t add one.

Other results:
• 43% of readers correctly selected “JCPenney,” the remaining 57% was split almost equally between “J.C. Penney” and “JC Penney.”

• 45% of readers correctly selected “Kohl’s,” but the same percentage of people also believe that it’s “Kohls.”

• Only 36% of readers correctly identified “Ralphs” for the L.A.-based supermarket chain, while 53% selected “Ralph’s.” This may be due to the regional nature of Ralphs, but then why did so many more people correctly know the name of Wegmans, another regional supermarket?

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