Damn, capitalism wins again!
I still don’t get why anyone should object to being filmed in a public place.
I’m going with hiding out or a WPP.
Well, for one, being in public in your home town isn’t quite the same as being in public on the Internet where everyone in the world can see.
But they do go up to people and bother them. Or point their camera at people and make comments. And, well, if I’m a woman and I see some creepy man pointing a camera at me, watching me, never leaving or going about his day, I’m going to start feeling like I’m being stalked. I’ve definitely seen that sort of reaction.
Just because they’re not breaking the law doesn’t mean they’re not making people feel uncomfortable. Come to think of it, I have seen some people go up to someone who is reacting and telling them “they’re doing this to make you react, just walk away.”
In short, these guys are provocateurs. If they aren’t getting a reaction from simply being there and being creepy, they’ll do more things. Just as long as their audience won’t see them as the bad guys, they’ll do anything.
Had this problem at the county building that I worked at. Didn’t happen directly to me, but some of these assholes would demand to go in and sit in someone’s office because it was a public building.
So up went the signs, the locks on the doors, and a full time sheriffs deputy on site.
We had a rule in our small 4 person department that no one was to be left alone. Sometimes problematic with overlapping vacations and sick time off. This was in a quiet mountain resort community of 25 thousand people.
The jerks that I originally posted about were eventually ousted from the Trader Joe’s parking lot by the police. But then they moved their shenanigans a few miles north and were seen in the parking lot of Costco at the height of the Saturday afternoon shopping crush. Nextdoor posters were saying that they were targeting mostly older women or moms with kids, and were speculating that this was because there’d be fewer chances of getting punched out.
If they are just attending there, filming, I’d ignore them. If they are harassing customers, I’d complain to management.
Fwiw, i was at a protest in a public parking lot recently. (Protesting a company that’s helping ICE, in a little local shopping area.) As we were setting up, the organizer told us that the parking lot was private property, and if the shop-owner told us to leave, we should had to do so, and she’s talked with the police about the closest public land we could move to (a sidewalk at the other end of the parking lot from the shops).
A manager at the supermarket next door came out to tell us to move, but when he realized we were protesting a different establishment, he just asked us to stand clear of their exit doorway, so the closest protesters moved about 2 feet over and he was satisfied. Honestly, i think he was satisfied once he saw we had nothing to do with his shop, as we were carefully not blocking anyone from any doors.
The employees at the place we were protesting called their management, but for whatever reason, neither they nor the police asked us to move. So we stayed until our scheduled end. One of the protesters then went into the shop to explain to the employees why we’d been there. (The front line employees at this location probably had no idea what their employer was doing.)
So, would management do anything? Management of the supermarket certainly would have, if we been bothering their customers. Management of the place we were actually protesting might not have. But i suspect they would have if we’d been interfering with customers going on and out. Or if customers complained.
You are probably right, but it’s also possible the management is being smart. You’re being very similar to the trolls of the OP (not morally, of course) in that you want to gain attention. In your case the goal is publicize and condemn the company’s bad behavior, rather than just get some clout.
If management completely ignores you, then the people who happen to be passing by might notice, and then it goes away. If they confront you and get the police involved, then it is much more likely to blow up into a story with media coverage and the potential to spread on social media.
In summary, perhaps corporate understands the Streisand Effect.
Yes, i think that’s why they chose to let us continue. And i think it was smart of them. But if we’d been interfering with their customers, my guess is they would have asked us to leave anyway.
I’m very sympathetic to your position. I used to go by the mantra, “Don’t feed the trolls,” when it came to discourse, but that only allows malignancy to fester until you suddenly start to wonder where all this effluence smelling of stinky cheese came from. Doing nothing might be the best thing to do sometimes but it’s not the best course of action all the time. I honestly don’t always know when it’s best to do something and when it’s best to leave it alone.
- The “don’t feed the trolls” thing works better (in comparison) on places like this message board, where official troll killers reside.
- I love the idea of mucking up their little passion plays by playing Disney music loudly, and I have a suggestion: “It’s A Small World”.
Train horns work even better!
Train horns won’t involve Disney lawyers. 
But they’ll drown out everything else, draw attention to them, & give 'em a headache if you do it right.
There’s fighting trolls and then there’s cruel and unusual punishment. 
As much as I’d like to clue-by-four the vandalous jerks doing the filming, the problem is their audience is so undiscerning that anything they record can be successfully monetized.
E.g. if someone parked a train horn blowing constantly right near the bastards, they’d simply replace 100% of the real audio with CG fake dialog of their victims being angry. Their audience won’t know or care that the audio doesn’t match the action.
Seems to me what’s needed is to pass laws saying deliberately recording individual private citizens in public without their consent constitutes assault. That way you can claim self-defense as you apply the clue-by-four to these folks.
Obviously the exact definition of the offensive prohibited behavior would be tricky. But a court system that wanted to stop it sure could. Note that no expansion of laws about any public behavior can be considered until after we have defeated the US fascists for good. Lest the new law be turned into an instrument of political control against the good populace.
It depends.
If a business is actually the legal owner of the real estate then yes, it’s private property and people can be removed at the request of the owner.
If a business rents their space then the situation may be a bit more ambiguous.
Some disruptive folks learn this distinction the hard way. The parking lot of the store I work at is fully owned by the corporation that owns the store. The local authorities will come and remove anyone that the management requests removed. Yes, the business is open to the public but retains the right to deny entry to individuals.
Lots of “solicitors” - young girls selling boxes of cookies, young boys selling candy bars for their basketball team, religious proselytizers, etc. - are surprised by this.
Meanwhile, the line of businesses along the front of the property are renting their space from the corporation I work for. Their rights are slightly different and they don’t control the parking lot.
This also probably varies by jurisdiction as well, as do so many things in the US.
In the case of one local Trader Joe’s, the store is a tenant of XYX Management Company, which manage (and may own the strip mall). It’s still privately owned. At another Trader Joe’s with which I’m familiar, the parking lot is a municipal one in the middle of the town.
Yup. But …
It would not be unusual for the tenant TJs to have the right under the lease to exert trespass control over the lot and interior premises. It would also not be unusual for other smaller businesses in the same center to have those same rights but nobody on duty in those stores knows those rights.
The biggest obstacle here is probably not legal. It’s awareness and willingness on the part of store management to inject themselves into the controversy out in the parking lot on behalf of their collective customers. An increasingly tough call in a world where viral bad reputation can be created and launched on a whim.
Then it comes down in part to what rights the tenant is granted in the lease.
If the only way a store could have any control/rights over a parking lot is by also paying rent for part of it or otherwise being obligated to help with upkeep then a business might choose to not have any rights over the lot. This can save money. Of course, in winter they would be utterly dependent on the lot owner doing things like plowing snow, but the owner having that duty should also be in the lease.
Like I said - if the business owns the real estate it’s pretty clear they can bar an individual for any non-protected reason. If the business rents the situation isn’t as clear cut.