Hbee Inc.

[Hi Kidz!  Thanks for stopping by!  You can find the start of the whole thing at this post.  You'll also find a clarification here]

“Hi, Paul! Howzit goin’!”

I spotted the police car around 11:35AM, ten minutes before the other participants arrived and twenty-five minutes before the actual start. The cop parked in the fire lane.

“Oh, my,” I smirked, in half-mock shock. Jeanne and her son wound up parking right next to and we stood chatting by the dry cleaners. “There’s cops already? We haven’t even started!”

“They’re not here for us,” Jeanne reassured me, “It’s probably just a Saturday thing.” She and Nathan decided to walk up to the front parking lot of the Star to check if any participants might have gotten mixed up. I walked back to the car to video the cop car. As I walked back to the dry cleaners, I saw what looked to be a Star Market manager talking to what was most definitely a cop. The cop walked down and stood in front of the dry cleaners.

Veering off towards the shelter of the wall, I debated on how to handle this. If they knew about meeting in front of the dry cleaners, they knew about the tell-tale carnation. I could take out the carnation and possibly slip through. Chances were they’d already spotted me. Well, better to find what they wanted – plus the slim hope existed that he was scoping out a heroin ring run out of the dry cleaners.

I walked out on the sidewalk and the cop ambled up to me.

Cop: Hi, Paul! Howzit goin’!
Me: Great! You?
Cop: Good. So. What’s going on? 

Good question! It seemed pointless to make something up, yet ridiculous to bluntly state the goal.

Me: Just gonna buy a greeting card! 

Cop: Right. Here’s the thing – This thing you’re gonna do…you can’t disrupt the flow of business.

Me: Nope!

Cop: Really. You can’t disrupt the flow of business. You can go in there, buy your greeting card, do whatever you’re gonna do, take it to the counter and out you go.

Not a hint of a threat came out of his mouth. His inflection, while admittedly gruff, bore no hostility. The guy was professional.

Cop: Ya know, everybody has their own causes and stuff, and I understand that, but you can’t disrupt the flow of business. 

Me: I don’t intend to.

Cop: Ok. I wanna make sure we’re on the same page.

Me: We certainly are!

Cop: Good. Cuz if you disrupt the flow of business, they’re gonna ask you to leave and if you don’t leave, we gotta arrest everyone. Ok?

Me: Yup!

Cop: Ok.

The cop ambled off again to stand by the stairs leading up to the Star. Seconds later, an Audi drove up in front of the dry cleaners. The woman illegally parked and jumped out with her dry cleaning. She spent about ten minutes inside while the cop…did nothing. Ok. That’s a little harsh. …while the cop waited for some pranksters to disrupt the flow of business.

At this point, I had no idea how the cops came to be there. I operated on the assumption that Star Market called in saying they believed a crime would be committed. And, indeed, there was. Some lazy bitch in an Audi needed to pick up her dry cleaning and FAST. No time to look for a parking space, she was already cutting it close with her massage therapist appointment. In this case (as in many others), the cop looked out for the interest of business first – disrupting the flow business took precedence over disrupting the flow of traffic. And, as if reading my mind, a guy with a shopping cart wound up stuck in front of the Audi, waiting for the traffic to subside so that he could get his groceries to his car. “Hey,” he yelled to his friend, “wait up! I can’t get around this damn car!”

With the stealth factor busted wide open, I waited for the other participants to arrive, if only to alert them to the fact that cops provided an x-factor to the proceedings. Susan, Arik and Sarah (with child) showed up. None of them blinked when I informed them of the police presence.

Noon rolled around. I counted six people. Kind of depressing, given that yesterday it looked like about thirty would show up. Oh, well. Who knew how many people just went straight in? Time to buy a greeting card!

I saw Sarah (with child) in the greeting card aisle. She chose a card that read “Thank You Very Much” on the outside. On the inside, it read something like “Thanks for all the help you provided to us!” Very appropriate! I chose “Our Deepest Regrets On The Loss Of Your Pet” and meandered over to the TV in the back of the store.

I turned the corner and Tony Orlando and Dawn smacked me upside the head.

Now the whole damn bus is cheering
And I can’t believe I see
A hundred yellow ribbons ’round the old
Oak
Tree 

Ok, not hundreds but a good fifteen people gathered ’round the gigantic high-definition God that hung from the ceiling! At least ten were complete strangers. Oh, my! YAY! We stood and stared, chatted and compared. “So…you’re supposed to shape the hamburger patties before you cook them?” “Wow! That looks great!” One guy took notes on his Palm Pilot. The video loop lasted about ten minutes.

I watched for a bit and then made my way to the front of the store to check on the TV there.

VICTORY 1! They’d turned off the picture on the TV! Yesssss! Diggity dog! You could hear the audio, but they’d switched the display to standby. I suppose someone decided they could negate the effect by forcing us to only one screen, much like a Rob Schneider movie released only to fulfill contractual obligations.

So – was the effect negated? Not really, because, sadly, I’m not sure any of the shoppers really paid attention. At first, that took me by surprise. After I thought about it, though, it got less surprising. Some shoppers looked at us watching TV and shook their heads, regarding us as a day trip from McClean?s. Most, however, just went about their shopping. They looked through us, focusing on the task at hand. It would be interesting to try this again, but not talk. I wonder if the chattiness drew attention away from the action of watching the TV. Perhaps it normalized the situation – who doesn’t talk back to the TV? As the group began to drift to the checkout, I felt happy, but slightly disappointed. I’d hoped for a little more reaction. Still – a very nice image and we all seemed to enjoy ourselves!

The results of actions are not always apparent. It’s completely understandable if someone left Star Market wondering if they’d really changed anything. Read on, my friends, read on!

For 12:30pm on a Saturday and a full parking lot, the checkout lines were dead. Possibly because all lanes were open. Why? Because management expected a log jam at the registers.

VICTORY 2! They put on extra cashiers to deal with a possible agitprop Armageddon! That’s money out of their pocket, folks! We also helped shoppers by shortening their lines – in effect, we gave them customer service they never could have dreamed of on a Saturday.

At the checkout, with my greeting card rattling around in my otherwise empty hand basket, I stared at the checkout TV. A woman with a full cart came up in back of me. “G’head,” I told her.

“But, you’ve only got one item,” she reminded me.

“S’ok.” I pointed to the TV. “This is really good.” Reluctantly, she moved ahead of me.

“Howzit goin’, Paul? You all done?” My cop appeared on my left hand side.

“Yup! Hope everything worked out ok. Everything cool?”

“Yah. Everyone behaved themselves.”

“Great!”

“All right.” He made to move, but then checked himself. “Listen,” he said, lowering his voice slightly, “I…I don’t really get what you guys were doing here.”

“Well,” I told him, “It’s kinda two things. First, I don’t really see any reason whatsoever to have televisions in supermarkets.”

“So,” he said in voice that indicated that he was scratching his head, “that email was meant to be sarcastic?”

Huh? The first email was, indeed, sarcastic. It was a copy/paste from the original blog entry….but it didn’t mention which Star Market we’d meet at, WHERE we’d meet OR the red carnation. Only the second email contained that information. So…as I know everyone on the original list, it seems that some Star Market sympathizer had the original email forwarded to them or, more likely, some marketing weasal has Google Alerts set up for “Star Market” and asked for more info. I’ve got a sneaking suspicion as to who it is. I got a couple of emails off the blog post. Still, it’s only a hunch.

“Yeah,” I said, “It was sarcastic.”

“Right”

“The other thing, though, is that these guys are making money off of us though this advertising. We’re not seeing a dime of it. They’re not lowering prices. And we have to put up with it.”

His eyes lit up. “Yeah! That’s right! It’s like at the Boston Garden – used to be you’d go to see a Bruins game and the boards along the ice was all white. Now there’s ads and stuff and I don’t wanna see that stuff.”

“Exactly! You’ve already paid for the service. It think it’s pretty lousy that they keep trying to sell stuff to you.”

He nodded. Then he smiled. “Well,” he grinned, “you got ‘em back a little.”

“How’s that?”

He looked at me fondly like an idiot cousin. “They had to pay for this work detail to be here.”

VICTORY 3! Yes! All told people counted three separate cops monitoring the store. Take THAT, Osama! BOOYA! Jeanne reported that she heard the manager whining about how we might have blocked up the registers and disrupted the flow of business – apparently three cops worth of business. Doing the math (and out of respect for the cop I won’t do the monetary break down), the cops alone cost Star Market about $240. Add in the extra workers and that’s not too shabby!

Summing up – If we were there to prove a point to the shoppers, I’m not sure we were 100% successful. However, we did put the fear of God into Star Market on a corporate level. And that absolutely ROCKS!

If there’s a lesson to be learned, it’s this – The threat of protest can be just as potent as the protest itself. Think about this – What if I’d billed this as the ubiquitous “disruption of the flow of business” and egregiously lied about the number of participants (“I’ve got two hundred people confirmed”). Star might have doubled the number of cops. And then – we called the whole thing off at 11:00AM. THAT would be funny!

Thanks again to everyone who showed up! Send me your thoughts via email or, better yet, leave a comment!

I’ve got a couple of other ideas that are rattling around in my head, so let me know if you’re interested in participating.

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