Why does it have to be quality control? Could also be a smart *** in programming. It has happened before.
My family has owned Uniden products (and others) for years and think highly of them. Regardless of whether the company is Uniden, GRE, or any other company, the following applies:
Quality-Assurance/Quality-Control (QA/QC) in any company should have a comprehensive check-list of items to verify before a product and each of its subassemblies moves from the "testing" phase to the "production" phase. Random-sample testing at the end of the "production line" should re-verify the correctness of the product, using the same QA/QC checklist and additional checklists for a finished working product.
"A correct start-screen / splash-screen" should be one of the items on the lists.
- Imagine if Microsoft Windows shipped with its splash-screen spelled "Mycrosfot Windoes".
- Would you really trust a business that had a street-sign like "Grammer and Speling Tuttors and Expurts. Caul to shcedule an apoyntment"?
- Wouldn't you begin to suspect that QA/QC was insufficient, and wonder about the product's or service's quality overall?
I know "Barecat" vs "Bearcat" is not a big deal, does not change product-behavior, is easily corrected by the end-user, and might have been done by a subcontractor by accident.
But it is an indicator of the quality of product-testing. To me it is not the same as some programmer putting a fun/harmless "easter-egg" into a software package. This typo happened in the "greeting" afterall, not in some obscure sentence in the back page of the owner's manual.
As far as employees are concerned, companies are supposed to have methods/systems in-place to protect the corporate-image from the employee who wants to joke-around or who might actually want to do the company-image harm. If the product worked perfectly in all other respects, then this typo-error would be easily dismissed as an odd fluke that some programmer might have tried to slip through just as a joke. When there are as many difficulties with the product as have been discussed in other threads here, it seems less like a joke, even if it does give the scanner-owner a good chuckle.
What's the poor sales-clerk in a local store supposed to say to the potential customer who turns on the display model and sees "Barecat" instead of "Bearcat"? "Oops"?