This is more than ordinary neighborhood self-congratulation. Our local Trader Joe's was the one caught up in a shooting and hostage situation a couple of weeks back, in which assistant manager Mely Corado was killed. It's been reopened for a couple of weeks (TJs sound as though they were extraordinarily thoughtful in relation to their employees all the way through the process), and they've put this large billboard opposite the store's entrance. The staff are all wearing tee-shirts with the same rainbow spiral, and ribbons and badges commemorating Corado.
This billboard, however, speaks to more: it's the celebration of a neighborhood that very much rallied round in grief and solidarity that awful Saturday afternoon (by luck, I wasn't down there shopping - I so easily, like so many of us, could have been - just heard the endless circling of helicopters as we watched the live stream of news of KTLA). People really do feel that it was their store and people whom they knew who suffered. What's more, I've never seen it so full. Shopping for groceries seems to have become a form of solidarity ... but above all, this billboard strikes an excellent note for a corporate owned (or indeed any) store: local, non-commercialized, and very much to the point.
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