I recently read on the web about a prank the folks over at Improv Everywhere pulled on a popular retail store in New York.
I actually stumbled into this after stumbling across LaughingSquid, a site that had been giving a “Cease and Desist” order by a popular retail chain when showing pictures of one of ImprovEverywhere.com’s t-shirts (which resemble that popular retail store’s employee shirt), which IE made for celebration of a prank they had done. Needless to say, the retail chain has since apologized to LaughingSquid.
The Prank
The prank involved IE gathering over 50 people, having them dress in off-the-rack blue short-sleeve shirts and khakis, then sending them - one at a time - into the store, and filming what happened.
With that setup, most people would think the store would laugh at the idea of seeing over 50 people dressed in similar attire wandering through their store. Apparently, aside from a few low-level employees, this turned out not to be the case, and threw management into an uproar, which eventually lead to the way overblown idea of calling the cops, who proceeded to swarm the store en masse…in order to ask the people to leave.
The Blow-Up
While the prank turned out to be not as funny in real-life as it originally sounded, it was interesting to see the way the situation was blown totally out of hand by several managers at this store. From one employees’s claim that the filmmakers were “violating her civil rights” by filming, to others talking robbery (with a notable mention to The Thomas Crown Affair, which turns out to be a much more popular film than I had expected), it was ridiculous enough that if it had been included in a movie plot, the viewers would have scoffed in disgust, and told the filmmakers to come up with something more closely representing reality.
Not once were the members of the prank ever accused of doing anything more than filming inside a store (and with working video cameras positioned right at the electronics station - where the public can not only use them, but is encouraged to - how can this be considered against company policy?) or wearing a blue shirt (to my knowledge, not any single store whose employees wear blue shirts - or other color shirts, for that matter - has posted a sign stating that customers were not allowed to wear that color). Yet, despite the lack of these pranksters actually doing anything wrong, the cops were called and actually argued with one of the cameramen that he was going to be arrested. Thankfully, he knew his rights and was able to leave the store.
As an aside, it’s interesting to note in IE’s videos of the situation, the only persons using foul language were some of the retail store’s own employees, whose voices were caught on tape during a break.
Our Thoughts
What kind of a world do we live in where an “invasion” of blue-shirted people constitutes a crisis at all, much less one of this magnitude? Isn’t this a type of discrimination? If a regular customer had been wearing a blue shirt that day, and had been treated this way, would they be able to file a lawsuit, or would it be dismissed as “just another prankster”? It seems odd to me that in this day of lawsuits (including the one that started it all, Liebeck vs. McDonald’s, where a jury awarded $2.9 million to a woman for spilling hot coffee on herself - despite a warning on the cup that the coffe was hot), a customer at that store could easily have sued and won if they had been wearing a blue shirt that day.
The Conclusion
Next time, maybe they should try wearing all red (ie… a different color than the employees wear) and pull the same stunt. The management team would probably be less agitated, and probably just as many customers would have stopped and asked for help, bringing about an even funnier sequence of events. As many of us know, wearing a short-sleeve shirt and being well-groomed in a retail chain is akin to asking for a fellow customer to stop and ask you for something - and the color of your shirt won’t matter a bit.
