Have you heard about shopdropping? It’s the big new fad among burgeoning anarchists who, instead of stealing, spread havoc by smuggling unwelcome items into stores. Think Che shirts in Target’s clothing department, or unwanted bunnies roaming the pet store after Easter. It’s all very badass and has several stores in a tizzy.
At Powell’s Books in Portland, Ore., religious groups have been hitting the magazines in the science section with fliers featuring Christian cartoons, while their adversaries have been moving Bibles from the religion section to the fantasy/science-fiction section.This week an arts group in Oakland, the Center for Tactical Magic, began shopdropping neatly folded stacks of homemade T-shirts into Wal-Mart and Target stores in the San Francisco Bay Area. The shirts feature radical images and slogans like one with the faces of Karl Marx, Che Guevara and Mikhail Bakunin, a Russian anarchist. It says, “Peace on Earth. After we overthrow capitalism.”
“Our point is to put a message, not a price tag, on them,” said Aaron Gach, 33, a spokesman for the group.
Mr. Jennings’s anarchist action figure met with a befuddled reaction from a Target store manager on Wednesday in El Cerrito, Calif.
“I don’t think this is a product that we sell,” the manager said as Mr. Jennings pretended to be a customer trying to buy it. “It’s definitely antifamily, which is not what Target is about.”
What is Target about? Corporate mouthpiece Bethany Zucco explains:
Our goal at all times is to provide comfortable and distraction-free shopping.
Shopping takes focus, people! Shopdropping is a dangerous distraction, a threat that could make us stop and think about our purchases.
Anarchists in the Aisles? Stores Provide a Stage [NYT]
(Photo: Kike Arnal/The New York Times)
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@Charles Duffy:
I agree (see my comment above this one). And granted, some of the stunts were rather benign. But what I found particularly troubling was the fact that Consumerist was glorifying the more disruptive stunts. “It’s all very badass and has several stores in a tizzy.”
What it comes down to is, the kind of shopdropping that Consumerist is glorifying isn’t going to cause any corporations to change their ways or anyone to stop and think. The only people who it adversely affects are the shift workers on the lowest end of the totem pole who have to deal with the ensuing confusion. Ironically, those are the people who profit the least from (and, if you want to go so far, are exploited by) the very thing these shopdroppers are trying to attack.
Oh, and as per “Keeping Austin Weird”… What I take issue with is people being weird for the sake of being weird, using the city’s slogan as justification.
The city is a great city because many diverse interests are represented and there is a strong cultural identity that is supported by local businesses. You contribute to that by becoming part of that community, not by being weird for the sake of being weird. Generally, those people end up contributing the least to the identity of the city because they have nothing of their own to bring to the table, which is why they have to fall back on “being weird” as their sole defining trait.
…But that’s a rant for a different day.
@Hambriq: Well, yeah. None of the folks I consider interesting self-identify as weird, at least not without being asked — but they fit in here, and wouldn’t necessarily elsewhere.
@just_paranoid: I love Mitch Hedberg too, he was truly ahead of his time.
I thought of him just last night when I was walking up a broken escalator at Sears and caught myself thinking, “An out of order escalator is stairs. The sign should say, “Escalator is out or order, sorry for the convenience.”"
Too bad his addictions finally got the better of him in 2005.