From the AJnet Archives: A guide to consumer guerrilla warfare!
I’m always talking about how much traffic the site received back in the early years. At our peak, the site was ranked in the top million websites on the entire internet (the exact Alexa ranking escapes me at the moment, I want to say it was around 800,000), and within the top 100,000 in the United States. Which doesn’t sound like a big deal, but considering that the site was just me drunkenly writing stupid bullshit and posting it on a bunch of shitty templates that I made in Adobe Dreamweaver, it was still pretty damn impressive. This was before SEO was a thing too, so I wasn’t worried about playing Google’s stupid algorithm games. Hell, all you had to do was Google “angry jerk” and this site was the first result. Doing that now yields multiple pages about some lame restaurant down in Maryland. Don’t worry, we’ll be dealing with those guys soon enough and reclaiming the Angry Jerk brand. Operatives EVERYWHERE, motherfucker.
Anyway, this notoriety definitely had an influence over the direction I took the site and what I wrote. By 2009 I slowly began shifting away from being intentionally inflammatory to being only sort of inflammatory but complaining about things that actually bothered me.
Unlike most people who were satisfied with just complaining, I was (and to some extent still am) a big proponent of direct action. Nobody cares about some assholes waving signs and crying about unfair business practices, but when you start attacking their bottom line, that’s when they take notice. I talked about this in one of my articles about internet censorship:
My method is simple: We nickel and dime them to death. Make them spend as much money as possible on everything and anything. Any time you can destroy something of theirs that costs money to replace, do it!
To you, it may seem like petty vandalism, but it adds up over time, especially if enough people do it. If only 1,000 people a day each inflict a mere $100 of waste on Walmart, that’s $100,000 of waste a day. There are about 365 days in a year. That’s $36,500,000 of losses a year. Walmart may be a multi-billion dollar corporation, but there’s no way in hell they won’t notice that kind of loss.
Walmart was always my go-to example for these rants, since at the time they were the most notable large retailer. If I had written these articles ten years later I’d have probably used Amazon instead.
“10 great ways to fuck with a grocery store” was an Anarchist’s Cookbook-esque article that was meant to serve as a sort of guide on how to inflict maximum financial damage on large retailers with minimal effort, while also allowing a sense of plausible deniability for the perpetrator should they get caught. Put simply, it was a guide on how to easily generate waste at a grocery store without being obvious. The article, written in July of 2010, drew not only from my years of experience in food service, but also from my job at ShopRite, which I had just started earlier that year.
How well did my guide hold up? Let’s find out. Here’s “10 great ways to fuck with a grocery store“, originally published on 7/24/10.
Had a bad experience at the local supermarket, and want to do more than send an angry letter that will probably be laughed at by most of management? Maybe you’re an activist looking for an effective way to wage guerilla warfare against the evil corporations? Are you just a bored troublemaker looking for new ways to fuck with people? Here are some great ways to not only fuck with a store that sells food, but to incur a cost on them in the process.
1. Open things.
Slightly unscrew soda caps, open box tops, put tears in bags. Do it just enough so it’s not obvious to everyone in the general vicinity that you’ve tampered with something, but enough that a customer interested in the item will notice it and be dissuaded. The store will have to mark them off as losses. Even if they return it to the company they got it from, they won’t get any kind of full refund, just some credit towards a replacement.
2. Poke holes in liquid containers.
It’s as easy as putting a pushpin thumbtack in your hand and picking up the milk jugs. That way when they analyze the security cameras to see who poked holes in everything, all they’ll see is you picking up and inspecting the items. At the very least, you’re costing them a couple of bucks with each gallon of milk you poke. At the best, you’re opening them up to a lawsuit if they don’t catch the slow-leaking hole and someone drinks the spoiled milk and gets sick from it.
3. Place absurdly large orders at the deli, then abandon them somewhere where they won’t be found.
Be sure to place them somewhere where they won’t be found easily, and not refrigerated. What will happen is some minimum wage “associate” will come across them a couple of hours later, and have to write their values off as waste. Also, some stores have a pre-sliced section, where the items on sale that week are already cut and packaged so people don’t have to wait in line. This is both a pro and a con. On one hand, you won’t have to interact with someone who might suspect you’re up to something, but on the other hand the sale items are less likely to be costly enough to do much damage.
Alternatively, you can just give the clerk the order, then tell them you’ll be back for it after you go grab a few other things in the store. Deli clerks hate having to cut two things at a time, bring them to you, then have you tell them two more items. They’ll be grateful to have someone give them a list so they can just pop out all the items without having to stop. When you don’t come back in an hour, they’ll either have to write off the value of the already sliced order, or put them in with the discounted meat/cheese ends, which will still cause them to take a hit. Some stores also have a Dexter Deli machine, which allows you to put your order into a computer and come pick it up later. This is great, because now you won’t have to worry about some employee who takes their job too seriously remembering your face and pointing you out the next time you come in.
A good thing to remember is that anything with the word “imported” in it will be more expensive. Just look at the prices and use your own discretion.
4. Hide refrigerated and frozen items in various places across the store.
Going back to the first paragraph of #3, this is a very good way to inflict needless waste on a grocery store. Your best bet is to do this with easily-perishable items, like meat and dairy products. Chicken is the best meat to do this with, since raw chicken always smells bad to most people, even when it’s still good. You can also do this with ice cream, but you’ll have to rely on the container leaking, or the dim-witted associate might simply put it back in the freezer so it can freeze again.
As always, use your judgment. It will be easier to hide a yogurt than it will to hide a gallon of milk. Not that it can’t be done.
The best thing about this method is that in the event some overly-haughty faggot employee sees you doing this and questions you about it, you can just tell them you received an urgent call or text message and you didn’t have time to put the item back. It’s not like you’ll be detained by security for not putting an item back where it belongs.
5. Bruise the produce.
Would you buy a kiwi fruit with a soft squishy spot? Me neither. Put soft squishy spots on anything you can. All it usually takes is a little bit of pressure applied to the item, and you’ve cost the store money. Experiment with various fruits and vegetables until you find the ones that bruise the easiest.
6. Put large dents in boxes and canned goods.
Dented boxes and cans look ugly, so not many people will readily buy them unless there’s no more of the same item on the shelf and they really want the item. This doesn’t happen often, since the bored stock people will often refill the shelf before it can be completely depleted, and many of them are too lazy to rotate stock. The dented items will just keep getting pushed to the back until they’re outdated and written off as waste.
7. Stain things.
As with dented items, people are less likely to buy an item if it has an unexplainable stain on it. Beef blood works best in this case, since it leaves a highly recognizable stain. This method works the best in a Super Walmart, where they also sell clothing that you can stain with food. PROTIP: Coffee and ketchup are almost impossible to get out of white clothing items.
8. Squash bread items.
Have you ever noticed that the bag boys usually place bread items in a separate bag? That’s because it squashes very easily, and nobody likes smashed up bread. Lean on several bags of bread at a time with sufficient pressure, and you’ve effectively rendered them worthless. Clumsy you.
9. Raw chicken is your best friend.
Raw chicken is the worst cross-contaminant. Put it on anything and everything, especially produce. If the store is following code, they’ll have to discard the produce, and possibly even the chicken. If not, well, you’ll just have to go ahead and report them to the board of health, won’t you?
10. The self-service prepared food bar.
Many grocery stores have a self-serve prepared foods bar, where you can fill a container with prepared food or salad and take it to the cashier, who will charge you for it depending on the weight. I have yet to encounter a place that makes you pay as soon as you’re done spooning it out to yourself, so just walk around for a few moments before casually discarding it behind some boxes of Fruit Loops.
A warning about security. Most stores employ plain-clothes security officers who will look like your every-day customer. If you’re serious about doing this kind of stuff, do reconnaissance. Hang out at the store for an hour or so every day for a week and look at people. If you see the same person on an almost daily basis walking around without any items, chances are they’re security. But unless you’re making what you’re doing obvious, nobody’s going to pay any mind to you. It’s probably best not to do this stuff on a daily basis, since eventually the employees WILL remember you, and security will eventually look at the security camera footage and identify you from it.
You can even make it more fun and keep score of how much money you’re costing the store on each trip. Challenge yourself each time to beat your previous score. Get your friends in on the fun and compete to see who can rack up the most waste.
This is what happens when you fuck AJ over. You could have just given me the French onion dip at the advertised price, Walmart. But nooooooooooooo. You insisted on making me pay that extra dollar. I hope that extra dollar was worth the huge amounts of waste you’re going to incur when other angry consumers read this article and get ideas from it.
Have a success story? Share it with me, and maybe I’ll post it.
At the end of the article, I mentioned Walmart overcharging me for French onion dip as my motivation for writing this. That was a load of shit, nothing like that happened. I simply wanted to inspire people to screw large retailers over. I don’t know why I felt the need to make up some story about French onion dip, but it was stupid and pointless.
Honestly, compared to some of my other old articles, this one held up kind of well. I feel like one could still employ most of these methods against a grocery store even today, so long as they remained discreet. Especially now that most of them are severely understaffed. The only serious obstacle would be facial recognition, which many stores now use. Even ShopRite uses it now. I’m told the information gets synced across every ShopRite in the country, and if someone who was previously flagged walks into the store security is alerted.
The rest of the tactics mentioned could still work, albeit with some minor adjustments. Nowadays it would be even easier to coordinate such a large effort. Though you’d probably need tens of thousands of people doing this stuff every day to hurt companies like Walmart, and they’d probably just use that as one of many excuses to justify jacking up prices even further, or locking stuff up like they’ve started doing in Philly and many other cities.
The basic principle of attacking the money still definitely holds true even today, though it’s more in the form of boycotts. We saw it work with Bud Light, and many other companies are starting to back down on the “woke” stuff. Companies only care about making money, plain and simple. Companies like Bud Light only cared about gay and trans people because they thought it would be profitable, not because they actually gave a shit. Need more proof? Here’s a fun game you can play during Pride Month. Find any large company that changed their logo to a rainbow on social media. Now find the social media accounts that they use for marketing in the Middle East. See any rainbows there? Me neither.
Obviously I’m not encouraging people to use these tactics against companies for supporting gay rights, that was just the most recent example that came to mind. The point I’m making is that when consumers band together and do something that affects a company’s profits, the company generally notices.
The fact is, enshittification is only going to continue until consumers start taking a stand against it (I absolutely hate acknowledging anything that Cory Doctorow says as having any validity, but “enshittification” is the perfect word for this). The only way companies will listen to consumers is when they start losing money, be it from boycotts, shoplifting, or vandalism. Complaining and legislation have gotten us nowhere, the only thing that will work is direct action.
I’ve been advised by Jamir in Legal to mention that AJnet Magazine nor myself condone or encourage our readers to commit criminal acts against grocery stores, retailers, or other companies. If you get caught breaking the law, you’ll probably go to jail and get fucked in the ass by large black men, or at least slapped with a hefty fine. Unless of course you live in a major city, in which case the District Attorney will refuse to prosecute you because they’re a spineless pussy. Fuck you, Krasner.
Next month’s AJnet Archives article will probably be a combo of two old articles about Criminal Minds that are just basically fanfics written with tables like my unfinished Back to the Future: My Way article.
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