Letter to the Editor

Editor:

The new mural on Green Apple Books & Music on Clement Street is a window into the falsehood that its management is community-oriented and progressive-minded, as so many of its customers must be.

Although there is no written claim of it being public artwork, the mural illustrates a weak attempt to signify neighborhood diversity - the kind of patronizing gesture that liberal minds readily recognize as misplaced superiority. Once a regular customer, I was made increasingly aware of its management's offensiveness.

I was not surprised to witness two recent incidents: a manager berating an employee for thinking that his "personal life was more important than work" and a different manager scoffing over a female employee's distress when a lecherous customer (sexually harassed) her. (This manager asked another female employee to help this customer instead.)

Management shows the same level of forbearance to non-staff. I noticed yet another manager without compassion or discretion scream at a quiet and destitute older man, banishing him as if he were a mangy dog!

Yesterday, I asked for a copy of Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables" and an employee directed me to the non-fiction section. His mistake is hardly surprising when management approves a mural that depicts a "Biography" section in the store, when there is no such categorized space in the whole of Green Apple.

Rotten at the core, Green Apple management has convinced me that it is not worth my effort to support it as a neighborhood business when they themselves cannot support the neighborhood even to a point where their storefront "artwork" far from accurately represents its locale (and even store layout).

Emily McKintyre