One of our good friends, Marc Bramhall, had his website shut down yesterday morning by Shaw's corporate for displaying information they deemed unsuitable. Bramhall's page, which is a tribute to Southington's former Shaw's supermarket, which we spotlighted in our last update, has ubruptly been discontinued by Cease & Desist Order coming straight from the raider patrol at Shaw's.
To be fair, Shaw's cited some information on the website which was understandably unsuitable to be displayed as it forsaked the privacy of former employees who had worked at Shaw's. In addition to the list, Bramhall featured a series of photographs from the final months at Shaw's, which they further deemed unsuitable on the grounds of violating "trade secrets" (a popular argument retail establishments use for the prohibition of photography). While a partially understandable argument, it's also not enforced at many places as it is merely unwritten rule - giving the camera barer full right to photograph freely on (privately-owned) public property. As you know, there are many sources on the internet, including ours, which feature photographs of in's and out's of stores for non-profit use. We received shock, it opened our eyes to relative action, but we will troop on and keep on doing what we do for the love of retail.
Furthermore, Shaw's observed the harmless nature of his tribute site, but still condemned it demanding Marc remove the site content pending legal action. We all found it strange how the site was kaput, being targeted, after being active for a little over a month. We would like to extend our support to Marc with hopes this won't discourage his reporting on preserving moments in retail history.
Furthermore, we at the Caldor Rainbow would like to thank Jason Damas at Labelscar for him plugging our Westfield Meriden report in his own [out-of-state] take on one of Connecticut's first malls. We are currently working on future projects on revealing more malls across Connecticut so stick with us.
