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What is a Whirl-Mart?
The action is comprised of a group of anti-shoppers ranging in size from 1 to 50 members. The ritual consists of activists/actors arriving at a Wal-Mart, Toys-R-Us or another chain superstore at 12-noon on the first Saturday or Sunday of the month and proceeding to push empty shopping carts slowly and silently through the aisles. Eventually, all of the participants locate one another and form a single-file chain of anti-shoppers which weaves, wanders, and whirls throughout the store for about an hour. It is a collective reclamation of space that is otherwise only used for buying and selling. It is a symbolic display of the will to resist the capitalist ideology.
'Whirl-Mart' is an experiment that can be approached from several different angles. As a work of art, it examines and blurs the boundaries that have been established between performance art, protest, living sculpture, and direct action. As an action of resistance, it utilizes the power of silence in occupying private consumer-dominated space with a symbolic spectacle. As a ceremony, it is a counter-ritual to shopping that transforms the super-store and its wall-to-wall array of products into a surreal and colorful cathedral. And what the heck-- it's just darned fun!
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National & Worldwide
Whirl-Mart Ritual Resistance International Whirl-Mart HQ World Changing Models, Tools, and Ideas for Building a Bright Green Future Critical Mass Critical Mass is not an organization, it's an unorganized
coincidence. It's a movement ... of bicycles, in the streets. Rev Billy's Church of Stop Shopping Lots of great scripts from/for performance interventions
with a heavy focus on Starbucks. Commerce
Jamming Commerce Jamming source page. AdBusters A global network of those who want to advance the new social
activist movement of the information age. Commercial Alert wants to keep commercial culture within
its proper sphere, and to prevent it from exploiting children and subverting
the higher values of family, community, environmental integrity and
democracy. No Media Kings Jim Munroe's guide to doin' it for yourself Booksense.com Internet book search that sends your order to your nearest
independent bookstore. Starbucks Delocator Search that helps you locate locally owned alternatives to Starbucks
Media
The Independent Media Center is a network of collectively run media
outlets for the creation of radical, accurate, and passionate tellings of the truth Project of the Independent Media Institute, a nonprofit
organization dedicated to strengthening and supporting independent and
alternative journalism. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the first to identify
threats to our basic rights online and to advocate on behalf of free expression
in the digital age. Declan
McCullagh's Politech Politech is the moderated mailing list of politics and technology.
Topics include privacy, free speech, the role of government and corporations,
antitrust, and more. MediaChannel.org The global network for democratic media.
PLUS the News Dissector's Weblog. CorpWatch.org counters corporate-led globalization through education,
network-building and activism.
CASPIAN Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering
Q. Supermarkets are just rewarding loyal shoppers. What's wrong with that?
The notion of "rewarding loyal shoppers" is wrong on two counts.
First is the myth of a "reward." The markets claim that the opportunity
to participate in the program is their way of "rewarding" you for your
loyalty to the store. But a reward is a tangible benefit you wouldn't
have had otherwise. There is no benefit in being recorded and tracked
for the "privilege" of paying the same sale prices you'd always been
able to pay in the past. (In fact, you often wind up paying prices that
are even higer than they were before the card program was introduced.)
Shoppers are not signing up out of a sincere desire to contribute their
private information to the supermarket's database, but in response to
coercion and strong-arm tactics -- "if you resist you'll pay a price."
This is not how a store rewards "loyalty," it's how a bully with power
(the power to affect your pocketbook -- and ultimately the power to
keep you from eating) abuses its power to subdue and control the
shoppers that patronize it.
Second is the myth that these cards are offered to shoppers who
demonstrate loyalty. Leaving aside for the moment the issue of whether
a supermarket, of all institutions, is one to which I would even want
to demonstrate loyalty, there is the simple fact that these cards are
issued indiscriminately to anyone who walks in the door -- not as a
reward to selected shoppers who are somehow more loyal than others.
Supermarket "loyalty" programs reward submission and compliance with
the registration, numbering, and surveillance agenda -- not loyalty.
MediaChannel.org
