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A St. Petersburg Publix uses plastic shields to keep sexy women's magazine covers out of public view.
By BILL DURYEA
© St. Petersburg Times, published December 26, 2001
ST. PETERSBURG -- On the subject of racy women's magazines displayed at the checkout counter, the world can be divided into two groups.
The first, largely male, scans headlines such as "99 Hot Things To Do With a Man" and wonders why there's so much advice and so few people practicing it.
The second, largely female, hears her 6-year-old sounding out the words to "The easiest, steamiest turn-on-your-man plan ever!" and calls for the store manager.
Nobody cares about the mopes in the first category. The second group is another thing altogether. These people, the decent folk who spend hundreds of dollars a week nourishing their families, get attention in a hurry.
It is for them that the store manager at the Publix on Fourth Street N and 38th Avenue placed white plastic shields over the covers of the latest issues of Cosmopolitan, Glamour and Redbook.
Think of the shields, which leave only the title showing, as the magazine equivalent of a Muslim woman's burqa.
Though faintly translucent, the screens are plenty opaque enough to obscure Julia Stiles' yeasty cleavage on the cover of Cosmo as well as the tease to the feature on "Sexy Holiday Looks" ("Warning: It Won't Be a Silent Night"). Without actually pulling out a copy of the forbidden product, a shopper would go straight to "Paper or plastic?" without ever learning Glamour's "7 Best Sex Tips You've Ever Heard."
And that's just fine with many Publix customers.
"We did this to address long-term complaints about objectionable magazines at our checkouts," said Lee Brunson, spokesman for Publix.
Publix is not the first supermarket chain or retailer to tell the sex-mad mags to go put something on. Kroger, the nation's largest supermarket chain, introduced similar screens in early 2000.
Kroger's decision followed a strenuous campaign by Morality In Media, a New York-based group that began pressuring retailers in July 1999.
Lakeland-based Publix, known for its conservative, family-oriented philosophy, had a longstanding policy that gave its store managers the discretion to remove magazines when they received complaints. Of course, it's hard to buy a magazine when all the copies are in the manager's office.
This spring Publix tested the plastic covers in eight Central Florida stores, Brunson said. They became available to all 675 stores in August. Each manager receives a supply of 24 white screens to use at his or her discretion, Brunson said.
"We don't place them on automatically," he said.
A quick survey of Publix stores in Tampa and St. Petersburg revealed that use of the screens is far from consistent. The supermarket at the end of Bayshore Boulevard in Tampa does, but the larger store on S Dale Mabry does not. At the Fourth Street store in St. Petersburg, there's no uniformity even from aisle to aisle.
Cosmo's "Whoops I Forgot My Panties' and More No-Brainer (Pick-up) Lines" is incommunicado in the express checkout but considered no more offensive than your average Ladies' Home Journal in Aisle 10.
The reasoning behind this microparochialism is not known; Publix does not permit interviews with its store managers.
"They probably just overlooked it," Brunson said.
Nor is it all that clear what's being objected to. Brunson maintains it's the photographs, but the most vocal critics, Morality in Media among them, don't mind a plunging V neckline as much as having to define the word "nooky" to a curious second-grader.
"People are getting a little tired of the in-your-face sexuality," said Patrick McGrath, spokesman for Morality in Media. "It's all right if they're going to sell the magazines on an aisle where you don't have to go to do your shopping."
The magazines, whose idea of groundbreaking journalism is "Earth-quaking orgasms," have managed to summon up some righteous indignation of their own.
"We believe in the right to freely disseminate legally protected material," said Ronni Faust, spokeswoman for the Magazine Publishers of America. "It's unfortunate that a highly vocal minority is trying to deprive millions of Americans of the right to buy their favorite magazines."
No figures exist, Faust says, on what the shields do to checkout-line sales. But given that the cover content seems not to have changed since the screens' introduction, it's hard to say that either side can claim victory.