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Customer Sabotage

Got this message from someone I know who works at a Barnes & Noble whose location shall remain unnamed:

“I’ll be glad when [Ann] Coulter drops off the [best-seller] list, for obvious reasons of taste, but also because customers keep turning her book around or taking it off the shelf and hiding quantities in the back of the store.”

This got me to wondering whether Michael Moore and Al Franken books are similarly sabotaged in bookstores — but, more broadly, it got me to wondering just how pervasive this kind of customer sabotage might be. Not necessarily anything as drastic as when animal-rights activists dropped a dead racoon on the lunch plate of Anna Wintour (who edits Vogue and who loves to wear fur). But do vegans go to the supermarket and hide steaks behind the rows of cereal? Do fans of one hip-hop star bury the CD’s of rival stars? Do people who love American cars go to test-drive German cars just so they can smear something sticky on the leather interior?


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