NOTHING™
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Mall Has Police
Arrest Activists for Promoting Buying NOTHING™ by
ANNA & RACHEL WHITE Yesterday, the day after Thanksgiving, aka “Black Friday,” has come to mark the “official” start of holiday consumerism. On this day, millions of people across America get up in the wee hours of the morning to participate in the annual pilgrimage to the mall and the year’s most massive shopping orgy. In Delaware, home of tax-free shopping, credit card capitol of the world, and the state of incorporation for well over half of Fortune 500 companies (thanks to the state’s pro-business laws), the holiday shopping season is taken very seriously. On Thanksgiving day, the newspaper comes stuffed with several inches thick worth of advertisements for holiday sales and early store opening times the next day…7:30 am, 6:30 am, even 5:30 am…and special enticements for shoppers wary of getting out of bed so early, e.g. $500 laptop computers for the first 100 customers lined up at Best Buy. The annual shopping frenzy becomes the top news story for several days leading up to and after “Black Friday” with speculation about what will be this year’s hottest electronic gadget fad or toy craze, how much people will spend compared to previous years, and how malls are attracting customers. The so-called “balanced” media, however, routinely fails to cover the downside of binge consumerism, such as skyrocketing personal debt, global environmental destruction, and exploitative labor practices. A loose collective of concerned citizens around the world have chosen to challenge this runaway consumer culture that threatens health, jobs, environment, and psychological well-being by claiming the day after Thanksgiving as “Buy Nothing Day” and engaging in creative actions to raise important issues that will never grace the pages of glitzy holiday advertising. For the past five or so years, we have marked Buy Nothing Day with a trip to our local shopping mecca, Christiana Mall. Instead of shopping lists and credit cards, we bring humor, ideas, and theatre. Early on we dressed up as Santa Clause and his elves, wearing signs like “More Joy, Less Stuff!” “Santa needs a Break” and “Unplug the Christmas Machine” and carrying a sack of alternative gift ideas (our Santa was once kicked out of the mall for “impersonating Santa Claus”). Two years ago, we decided it was time for a new act. And thus, the product NOTHING ™ was born. The act was simple. We dressed up as marketers for the product NOTHING ™. We wore black pants and white t-shirts with the slogan “NOTHING ™ What you’ve been looking for!” on the front and “Ask me about NOTHING ™” on the back. Key to costumes were big shopping bags labeled “NOTHING ™” and “FREE SAMPLES”. To top off the costume, we wore the season-appropriate Santa hats. The costume never fails to work. The red festive hats grab shoppers' attention, the t-shirts pique their curiosity, and the advertisement for free samples lures them to initiate a dialogue with us. Conversations invariably go like this: “Can I have a free sample of whatever you have?” “Sure! Hold out your hand.” Meanwhile, we pull a plastic jar labeled NOTHING ™ out of our bag, take the lid off and pour nothing into the outstretched hand of the unsuspecting patron. “ NOTHING ™ is a revolutionary new product," we enthusiastically exclaim, "It's affordable to all, good for the environment, sweatshop labor-free, appropriate for all ages, and lots of fun!” Some of our “patrons” have reacted with further curiosity. “What is it? Can you eat it? What is it for?” While others soon grin or break out into laughter. At the end of each interaction, we give our “patron” a small flyer with a full list of NOTHING ™’s attributes. It reads “NOTHING ™ What you’ve been looking for! AFFORDABLE TO ALL • NON-TOXIC • SWEATSHOP LABOR-FREE • FAMILY FRIENDLY • ZERO WASTE • NOT TESTED ON ANIMALS • ALL NATURAL, 100% ORGANIC • FUN & CREATIVE! • APPROPRIATE FOR ALL AGES • LIFETIME WARRANTY • SATISFACTION GUARANTEED (or your money back!) www.adbusters.org" The opposite side features a political cartoon of a man bringing a box of recyclables out to a curb and sighing at the sea of signs and billboards around him telling him to “DISPOSE and BUY MORE” “CONSUME More!” “BUY MORE STUFF” “KEEP ACQUIRING MORE” “YOU NEED A NEW ONE” “Run Right Out and BUY ONE!” “BUY More! More! More!” “REPLACE THAT OLD ONE WITH This Year’s Model!” We also give a transaction receipt for Buy Nothing Day. The “items” read ¢orporat€ Gr£€d i$ Killing Our Plan£t and adds up to a total of “0.00”. The top says “No Purchase Necessary,” while the bottom says “THANK YOU FOR NOT SHOPPING.” The vast majority of shoppers with whom we converse find the interactive street theatre highly amusing. One year, a man was overjoyed to find us, exclaiming, “Nothing – that’s exactly what I’ve been telling my wife I want for Christmas!” and he called her over to reemphasize his holiday "wish." While shoppers have been overwhelmingly positive toward our little act, mall management has not. Each year, very soon after entering the mall, security guards begin to trail us. Usually after 10-15 minutes they surround us and try to make us leave, at which point we argue that we are not violating the law or any of their policies. They in turn accuse us of “soliciting” to which we reply that we’re “soliciting nothing.” This never fails to elicit a detailed discourse over the definition of soliciting. We always point that we never initiate conversations with shoppers. We wait for them to come up to us instead. And we only give a flyer about NOTHING ™ if someone wants it. Invariably, the mall security will make up a false tale about us approaching mall patrons or distributing flyers to people who don’t ask for them. Last year, they called the state police in to deal with us. An arrangement was worked out with the police that we were allowed to be in the mall, but we couldn’t carry any papers with us and we couldn’t approach any mall patrons. The police said that they would arrest us if we did not follow these orders. The police clearly found the mall rules rather severe for such a seemingly innocuous action, but they emphasized that we were on private property and if the mall owners didn’t want us there we had no right to be there. We put the papers in the car and returned. This year, just like others, a security guard began following us as we made our way down the crowded mall corridor from JCPenny’s towards Lord & Taylor giving away samples of NOTHING ™. In front of Lord & Taylor, a posse of five or so security guards were waiting for us. They asked us what we were doing. We explained that we were promoting NOTHING ™. They told us that we were soliciting “something” and would have to leave the mall premises. We asked the head of the mall’s security to clarify exactly what we were soliciting, to which he replied, “You are soliciting a reaction from people.” (One year, during a different Buy Nothing Action, we were accused of no less than “soliciting ideas.”) The standard conversation about soliciting ensued and the state police were once again called in to help deal with the situation. This year, a small army of mall security and state police told us that we were not allowed to even carry the shopping bags that said “FREE SAMPLES NOTHING™” on them or we would be arrested. Only the t-shirts and Santa hats were permissible. While we felt that the order was completely ridiculous, we also had not come to the mall that day to be arrested, so we agreed to take the bags out of the mall. Terri Maurer-Carter, who had come with us to shoot footage for a local public access television station was told that she was not allowed to have a videocamera in the mall and would be arrested as well if she did not leave. With a full police escort, we processed down the crowded mallway to the exit. We were amused to find that even the presence of police did not stop people from approaching eagerly for free samples of our product! We
exited the store. As we neared the edge of the sidewalk, a woman sitting
near the mall entrance came up to us to ask us what we were up to and
why the police had kicked us out. She was enthused about what we had been
doing and appalled at the mall’s reaction. Other passersby told us The three of us headed off to our car, with Terri and another friend trailing behind. Just as we were walking through the parking lot in front of one of entrances to JCPenny’s (but still far from our car), a police van swerved around in front of us and another in back of us. We were surrounded by policemen who told us we were under arrest for failing to obey their orders to leave the mall. We tried to explain that that was what we were trying to do, but they were already putting metal handcuffs on us and warning us not to resist arrest. At the same time, our friend with the video camera, was being arrested by another set of police officers. As we were being arrested, we shouted out to mall patrons that we were being arrested for promoting NOTHING and loudly decried the lack of freedom of speech at the mall. As the police drove us to the other side of the mall to be processed, our driver informed us that we needed to study freedom of speech laws a bit more, because “they don’t apply on private property.” We were led back into the mall, Santa hats still on our heads, hands still in handcuffs, through an employee entrance. In contrast to the flashy, holiday decorated inside walkways and storefronts, the corridor behind the stores was dim, drab, and dominated by cinderblock walls. Yet, the sounds of holiday tunes still rang clearly and somewhat incongruously through air. Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer was the soundtrack as we approached our final destination. As the police proceeded to handcuff us to the corridor wall, a new holiday tune broke through the air, “…It’s the most wond-er-ful time of the year…” Yes, indeed. The police took Polaroid mug shots of each of us, complete with our Santa hats and NOTHING ™ t-shirts. We were told we were being charged with “criminal trespassing” and given an arraignment date of January 15, 2005. After being fingerprinted, processed, and given a document banning us from the mall for a period of six months, we were told we could leave. We asked how we could get to our cars without violating mall rules once again. The police actually instructed us to walk through the mall, “FREE SAMPLES NOTHING ™” bags and all, to get to the mall entrance close to our car – basically the same exact thing that we had been doing when they had arrested us. But whatever. We later learned that at the exact time that we had been doing our little Buy Nothing Day act in the mall, the state police had been holding a press conference at one of the Lord & Taylor mall entrances to announce a new crime prevention program at the mall. They had wanted to hold the press conference inside the mall, but the mall management had forbidden it on the grounds that the media was not allowed to record inside the mall. The headlines on the front page of Delaware’s main newspaper the next day read “Police vow ‘vigorous’ holiday shopping security.” Don’t you feel a lot more safe now that people armed with absolutely NOTHING are no longer allowed to roam freely in the mall? Our
small action and the drastic response to it raises a variety of important
questions and issues, such as: What is so very dangerous about a humorous
promotion of purchasing NOTHING? In an era of declining public spaces
and the rise of malls as the new “town centers” (and many actually
naming themselves such), should not “freedom of speech” extend
to these quasi-public commercial spaces? Why are taxpayer-funded state
police protecting private commercial interests from citizens’ free
speech? How much longer can the devastating environmental and social impact
of voracious American-style consumerism be ignored? |
