My reporter friend is compiling a list of stories of pragmatic shopdropping.
Shopdropping, if you weren't sure, is the opposite of shoplifting, where
visitors leave items behind on the shelves of a store.
Rather than illicitly taking things from a store, it involves surreptitiously putting things there. There are lots of folks who over the years have done this for political and artistic reasons.
Artist Packard Jennings, for example, created a fake Mussolini action figure and packaged it in a box that advertised others in a fictional series, including Wal Mart founder Sam Walton. He returned the package to the store, attempted to buy it, and filmed the transaction as part of the exhibition. It traces back as far as 1989, when the Barbie Liberation Organization has been tackling what it sees as sexism among children's toys; the group swapped the voice hardware of Barbies with those in GI Joe dolls and replaced the products on store shelves. Shoppers expecting to push a button on Barbie's back and be greeted with the doll's familiar bubbly voice instead heard a masculine voice bellowing, "Vengeance is mine!" while unsuspecting
G.I. Joe owners were greeted with a chirpy feminine voice proclaiming, "I love shopping!" |
He has already compiled a considerable list of shopdropping as an artistic/political endeavor and is looking for more pragmatic instances of it.
He is out to collect more stories along the same lines, and would appreciate
your help. I know Cockeyed has the kind of audience that is particularly skilled
at thinking this kind of thing up. I appreciate your consideration of the
following:
-Pet shopdropping - a pragmatic issue:
Someone who had a pet (think: parents whose kids (callously) have lost interest in the family's pet mouse, snake, lizard for instance)
but had a difficult time finding a new home for it. So, they took it to a pet store where they were confident it would be well cared for
and they left it there surreptitiously. Anyone have stories of this sort?
-Guerilla recycling:
Someone who had some item that is not supposed to be thrown away. Maybe it is best recycled because it has things in it that are not
good for landfill (think: window air conditioner unit, refrigerator, a car). So they found a shop-dropping type method of getting rid of
it. Maybe they dropped it off at a repair shop for an "estimate" and never picked it up. Perhaps it was the guy with the old desktop in
his garage that he stopped using ten years ago but knows that he should not put in the trash can. Maybe - with a car - they left it on
street for it to be towed. Looking for stories on this.
-Targeting book stores:
Someone writes a book. Their local bookstore isn't carrying it. The author calls the bookstore pretending to be a professor or whatever
and asks for the bookstore to order a bunch of copies that they will pick up and pay for once the copies arrive. Then they never pick them
up in hopes that bookstore will just put the books out on shelf. Anyone ever done that? Small-time photographers or poets looking to
get noticed slip copies of their work into books as they peruse local bookstore. Anyone done that? Someone who
doesn't want to throw away their used books but they cant find someone willing to buy them so
they discretely leave a box of them in the corner of the nearby used bookstore. Anyone? Other tales welcome.
We are looking for any other examples that constitute shop-dropping but that are motivated by everyday pragmatics rather than by art/politics. |
Please email a contribution to him
(A copy goes to Rob) Thank
you!
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