O&AN reader Richard Cotton sent us the following note on Facebook after he personally witnessed an individual dumping a large number of copies into a trash can at his local Harris Teeter in Franklin. If you happen to see any suspicious activity around any of our racks, please let us know here so we can monitor the location closely.
Hey folks. Just wanted to make you aware of something and I wish it was good news... but here goes (this really has me bent out of shape). I live in Franklin in a development near West Haven and shop at the Harris Teeter there almost exclusively. Today as I was going in the store, I passed a woman coming out and I noticed she was coming from the magazine racks with an armload of some periodical that she dumped into a trash can. I thought it was strange but I was in a hurry and also just assumed that she could be working for one of the publications and was discarding old issues, etc.
I shopped for about a half hour and as I was heading back out of the store, I was reminded of what I had seen earlier with the magazines. It was then it occurred to me... you guessed it... that woman threw out all of the O&AN magazines! I looked at the empty rack, then looked in the trash where I could see that she threw every single issue away. I dug in the trash and pulled every issue I could reach back out and re-stacked the O&AN rack.
Fortunately they weren't ruined and were still in good condition. I'm going to alert the store manager next time I go in there, but I wanted to make you aware of the incident. I always look at the racks when I go in that store because they get all of the best free local periodicals at that store. I rarely see your magazine rack totally empty so hopefully this was somewhat of an isolated incident. At least for that particular store. I'm going to be stewing mad over this for a while.
- Rich Cotton