ABSTRACT
It is a Sunday afternoon in a well known ‘Do It Yourself’ store somewhere in a city in the northwest of England. There is the usual flow of families wheeling trollies around the spacious aisles. Anybody who was paying attention to the kind of people passing through the turnstile would notice a sudden influx of half a dozen obviously overdressed customers, followed by a steady stream of slightly unorthodox looking young men and women who, upon entering the premises, disperse themselves to different parts of the large store. Several minutes pass and then a young voice calls out loudly from the back of the store, demanding everybody’s attention. From the vantage point of an in-store trolley he informs people of the fact that the store stocks illegally logged mahogany products which have been extracted and produced at enormous social and environmental cost to indigenous peoples in Brazil. The demonstration of which he is a part is demanding that the store agrees to cease importing mahogany altogether. As he has been speaking, other activists have locked themselves to mahogany products using strong bicycle ‘D’ locks, have sat down on the floor or have begun putting up banners or leafleting the somewhat bemused customers. The store’s security staff and management converge on the huddle of people but realize too late that this has all been a decoy disturbance, and that the overdressed customers have ‘shoplifted’ various mahogany items and taken them to a nearby police station, reporting them as ‘stolen property’. Only two young men are 198apprehended, halfway across the enormous car park carrying a rather heavy mahogany table! The police are called in and confront the instore demonstrators who appear to be used to dealing with the law in this manner. Two newspaper journalists photograph the event and one or two questions are asked of the activists. A deal is struck between the protesters, the management and the police that if the demonstrators leave the store the manager will meet two of the demonstrators and discuss the issue further. The police sergeant says that she will look into the claims about ‘stolen property’, and the demonstration moves outside and resumes leafleting and talking to the public until the negotiators finish their business inside. Despite a few points of conflict about whether the demonstrators outside are on or off the company’s property, there is no trouble, and the demonstration presently moves off to try the same tactics on another outlet of the store in the same city.
