Allentown/Bethlehem Giant, Staples, Pet Supplies Plus OC

[sdsorrentino]

Again with the food shopping! Why can't you buy food once every couple of years instead of every week? I had to pick up a few items at the local Giant Foods. I already had one copy of the PA Gun Rights flyer

http://paopencarry.org/pdfs/Pennsylvania_Gun_Rights.pdf

but I thought that if I am going to OC regularly, I should have more than one. I also wanted to some of the cool No Guns = No Money cards

http://paopencarry.org/no-guns-no-money-cards

So that means a trip to Staples. If you can think of a way to screw up copying, I can do it, so I always leave the copying to the pros. I saved the PDFs to one of the little pocket flash drives and took it into Staples. Francisco printed the flyer with no problems but we couldn't get the cards to line up correctly. He suggested that I just have him take the images one at a time and just run up a 100 business cards. I'll be waiting till payday to do that, but it makes a lot more sense than wrecking another 5 card stock pages, and they'll look more professional. At no time did Francisco seen to care that my XD .45 was holstered at my hip. There's no question that he saw it, and he read the papers that he was printing, he just didn't care. And he didn’t charge me for the stuff we messed up.

Giant Foods was interesting. I went in there last week OC'ing, but I didn't interact with any of the staff except for the checkout girl. This time I had to get lunch meat, and the olives at the olive bar had gotten mixed up somehow and there were nasty cheese stuffed olives contaminating my yummy garlic stuffed olives. I asked the deli lady to fix it and she did, no problem. The other deli lady was a delight. She seemed very happy to cut me some Seltzers low salt Lebanon bologna. I got the rest of my stuff and checked out. The 18'ish guy at the register was pretty nice as well. Again, no one seemed to notice, or if they noticed, and someone must have, they didn't care. I passed the Bethlehem Police "Contact Center"(?i guess it's some sort of satellite office) on the way out and the guy at the desk looked right at me. I remained untackled and completely unarrested.

While walking the dog before my shopping trip, I used up the last poo baggie. (I’ll carry a gun, but leaving poo behind is just not neighborly) That meant I had to stop in to the local Pet Supplies Plus. Not only is it closer than PetSmart, Pet Supplies Plus has a self serve doggie wash. That means I don't have to figure out how to rinse soap off of a 70lb hair bomb in the bath tub while simultaneously trying to keep the bathroom clean and my knees from exploding. They were only too happy to sell me poo bags and again, if they noticed, they didn't care.

Since I was wearing black shorts and a red tee-shirt, a pair of those "urban hiking" boots, and have my long hair in a pony tail, I am pretty sure no one mistook me for a cop. I can only conclude that the majority of the people in the State really don't care all that much. Maybe the press only sticks their cameras into the faces of the panicky ones. Maybe the silent majority, if not exactly on our side, is at least fairly well disposed to us.

[mikey]

..............

[Curmudgeon]

Nice post, good story. Thanks for posting this. I hope the rest of your carry adventures are similarly uneventful.

And I owe you rep, gotta spread some around first.