Reply #87: Shall I tell you my retail experience with local TV media?

[Pacifist Patriot]

It may give you an idea of what I suspect happened.

Let's go back a few years to when The Satanic Verses was all the rage and flying off the shelves. I worked at a Waldenbooks in metro-Atlanta. A local tv station interviewed a few stores about being out of stock and all of us made the point the fatwa had made the book so popular we couldn't get delivery fast enough to keep up with demand. I unwisely made a crack about people being unable to find it on shelves because we were having to sell it out of the stock room because people were buying it as fast as we could open the boxes.

The asshole goes on air and shows a snippet of the interview with me, cuts away and then informs the public there are copies available but the stores have decided to pull it from the shelves and keep it in the stock rooms for fear of violence related to the fatwa against Rushdie. The next day a dumb ass redneck comes in my store and spits in my face (literally hawked one at me) and calls me an un-American coward for giving in to the "rag heads" and censoring Rushdie's book by pulling it off the sales floor. I have my doubts he would have understood the allegory if this idiot had slogged his way through the novel. (Judgmental much? You bet!)

I had another negative local television media experience when working holiday retail at an Eddie Bauer store in the Boston area, but I won't bore you with those details.

Suffice it to say, I don't for one minute put stock in anything a local television station says about what is going on inside a retail outlet. The truth is probably far less sensational than the story.