Published on Monday, December 24, 2007 by The New York Times 

 This is the season of frenetic shopping, but for a devious few people it’s also the
season of spirited shopdropping.

Otherwise known as reverse shoplifting, shopdropping involves surreptitiously
putting things in stores, rather than illegally taking them out, and the motivations
vary.

Anti-consumerist artists slip replica products packaged with political messages onto
shelves while religious proselytizers insert pamphlets between the pages of
gay-and-lesbian readings at book stores.

Self-published authors sneak their works into the “new releases” section, while
personal trainers put their business cards into weight-loss books, and aspiring
professional photographers make homemade cards - their Web site address included, of
course - and covertly plant them into stationery-store racks.

“Everyone else is pushing their product, so why shouldn’t we?” said Jeff Eyrich, a
producer for several independent bands, who puts stacks of his bands’ CDs - marked
“free” - on music racks at Starbucks whenever the cashiers look away.

Though not new, shopdropping has grown in popularity in recent years, especially as
artists have gathered to swap tactics at Web sites like Shopdropping.net, and groups
like the Anti-Advertising Agency, a political art collective, do training workshops
open to the public.

Retailers fear the practice may annoy shoppers and raise legal or safety concerns,
particularly when it involves children’s toys or trademarked products.

“Our goal at all times is to provide comfortable and distraction-free shopping,”
said Bethany Zucco, a spokeswoman for Target. “We think this type of activity would
certainly not contribute to that goal.” She said she did not know of any
shopdropping at Target stores.

But Packard Jennings does. An artist who lives in Oakland, Calif., he said that for
the last seven months he had been working on a new batch of his Anarchist action
figure that he began shopdropping this week at Target and Wal-Mart stores in the San
Francisco Bay Area.

“When better than Christmas to make a point about hyper-consumerism?” asked Mr.
Jennings, 37, whose action figure comes with tiny accessories including a gas mask,
bolt cutter, and two Molotov cocktails, and looks convincingly like any other doll
on most toy-store shelves. Putting it in stores and filming people as they try to
buy it as they interact with store clerks, Mr. Jennings said he hoped to show that
even radical ideology gets commercialized. He said for safety reasons he retrieves
the figures before customers take them home.

Jason Brody, lead singer for an independent pop-rock band in the East Village, said
his group recently altered its shopdropping tactics to cater to the holiday rush.

Normally the band, the Death of Jason Brody, slips promotional CD singles between
the pages of The Village Voice newspaper and into the racks at large music stores.
But lately, band members have been slipping into department stores and putting
stickers with logos for trendy designers like Diesel, John Varvatos and 7 for All
Mankind on their CDs, which they then slip into the pockets of designer jeans or
place on counters.

“Bloomingdale’s and 7 for All Mankind present the Death of Jason Brody, our pick for
New York band to watch in 2008,” read a sticker on one of the CDs placed near a
register at Bloomingdales. “As thanks for trying us on, we’re giving you this
special holiday gift.” Bloomingdales and 7 for All Mankind declined to comment.

For pet store owners, the holidays usher in a form of shopdropping with a touch of
buyer’s remorse. What seemed like a cute gift idea at the time can end up being
dumped back at a store, left discretely to roam the aisles.

“After Easter, there’s a wave of bunnies; after Halloween, it’s black cats; after
Christmas, it’s puppies,” said Don Cowan, a spokesman for the store chain Petco,
which in the month after each of those holidays sees 100 to 150 pets abandoned in
its aisles or left after hours in cages in front of stores. Snakes have been left in
crates, mice and hamsters surreptitiously dropped in dry aquariums, even a donkey
left behind after a store’s annual pet talent show, Mr. Cowan said.

Bookstores are especially popular for self-promotion and religious types of
shopdropping.

At BookPeople in Austin, Tex., local authors have been putting bookmarks advertising
their own works in books on similar topics. At Mac’s Backs Paperbacks, a used
bookstore in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, employees are dealing with the influx of
shopdropped works by local poets and playwrights by putting a price tag on them and
leaving them on the shelves.

At Powell’s Books in Portland, Ore., religious groups have been hitting the
magazines in the science section with fliers featuring Christian cartoons, while
their adversaries have been moving Bibles from the religion section to the
fantasy/science-fiction section.

This week an arts group in Oakland, the Center for Tactical Magic, began
shopdropping neatly folded stacks of homemade T-shirts into Wal-Mart and Target
stores in the San Francisco Bay Area. The shirts feature radical images and slogans
like one with the faces of Karl Marx, Che Guevara and Mikhail Bakunin, a Russian
anarchist. It says, “Peace on Earth. After we overthrow capitalism.”

“Our point is to put a message, not a price tag, on them,” said Aaron Gach, 33, a
spokesman for the group.

Mr. Jennings’s anarchist action figure met with a befuddled reaction from a Target
store manager on Wednesday in El Cerrito, Calif.

“I don’t think this is a product that we sell,” the manager said as Mr. Jennings
pretended to be a customer trying to buy it. “It’s definitely antifamily, which is
not what Target is about.”

One of the first reports of shopdropping was in 1989, when a group called the Barbie
Liberation Organization sought to make a point about sexism in children’s toys by
swapping the voice hardware of Barbie dolls with those in GI Joe figures before
putting the dolls back on store shelves.

Scott Wolfson, a spokesman for the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission, said
he was not sure if shopdropping was illegal but that some forms of it could raise
safety concerns because the items left on store shelves might not abide by labeling
requirements and federal safety standards.

Ryan Watkins-Hughes, 28, a photographer from Brooklyn, teamed up with four other
artists to shopdrop canned goods with altered labels at Whole Foods stores in New
York City this week. “In the holidays, people get into this head-down,
plow-through-the-shopping autopilot mode,” Mr. Watkins-Hughes said “‘I got to get a
dress for Cindy, get a stereo for Uncle John, go buy canned goods for the charity
drive and get back home.’”

“Warhol took the can into the gallery. We bring the art to the can,” he said, adding
that the labels consisted of photographs of places he had traveled combined with the
can’s original bar code so that people could still buy them.

“What we do is try to inject a brief moment of wonder that helps wake them up from
that rushed stupor,” he said, pausing to add, “That’s the true holiday spirit, isn’t
it?”

Christopher Maag contributed reporting.

Thanks to Global Circlenet for alerting us to this article.