Friday 16th Oct, grocery shopping at the Obs spa, night

Tonight, I went to buy some groceries at the Obs Spa, in my Masai cloth. The spa was sparsely ‘populated’ by shoppers.
They went about their own business and even when i was queueing to pay, no one enquired about my attire/ no security guard asked me to step aside to be searched for possible ‘shoplifting’, etc.
I wonder whether if we were a number of us in the spa in the same dress whether we would have been allowed in, or followed closely by security guards.
As Paul Edwards says in ‘Citizenship Inc: Negotiating Civic Spaces in Post-Urban America’, in last sem’s critical studies reader on space, site and interaction, “… Malls are within their rights prevent all types of activity that they feel intereferes with the business of shopping. This includes excluding undesirables, banning photography…” The last is the reason why I couldn’t take photos inside the spa, but i will upload the receipt as proof!
Edward also tackles the subject of dressing up in malls when he narrates a 2003 incident concerning Stephen Downs and Roger, his son, who were arrested in a New York mall for ‘tresspassing’ after refusing to remove their T-shirts denouncing the USA invasion of Iraq in 2003. “Although shopping malls are places of public gathering, federal and state courts have ruled, with limited exceptions,that shopping centres have a legal right to remove people disrupting their business…”
So it seems as long as i behaved like other shoppers, ie, select and pay, i would be given the benefit of the doubt.
As i walked home along Disa Ave i met a Woodstock police car on patrol. The driver was driving slowly and i knew i was going to be stopped, but it passed. Perhaps because i was carrying my groceries and my receipt acted as my insurance policy, and also because i wasn’t staggering!

Supermarket. Image courtesy of http://www.retailstoragesolutions.co.uk/sitefiles/linkretail/rightimage/Kwik_Save3.jpg