We had gotten in contact with the people at Easton, this giant shopping mall in Columbus, over spring break a few months ago. The guy we got in contact with actually seemed pretty cool, and said he was interested in what we were doing. Then we got turned down.
This wasn't surprising in the least. I think it was Steve Carrell who said in an interview with the Columbus Dispatch that one time when he was visiting Easton, he threw a pebble in the air and was approached by security for disturbing utopia. It was still a shame we got denied, though, because Easton can play host to a fairly diverse array of people.
The good news is that Austin came up with a way around this. We both wore plain white t-shirts with the trademark phrase written on them and walked around with a video camera. We weren't approached by nearly as many people as we were at other places, and part of that I think was that we were mobile for most of the time, walking around rather than sitting at a bench or something.
We did get some questions, though, mostly when we went into stores and looked around at stuff. We actually got into a lengthy conversation with this sales guy at Brookstone named Patrick. Apparently he was from Texas and had been in Columbus just a few months, and he'd observed in his time here that people up north/in the midwest seem to be more concerned with themselves, whereas he found the people down south to be more outgoing and friendlier in general.
We talked about some more topical issues with him, such as when he asked us about the legalization of marijuana. Austin and I actually handled that pretty well with a tag team effort. He covered the economic side, and I handled the policy issues. Other than Patrick, we didn't have that many in-depth conversations, but it was still worth it, even if only just to see how this method worked as opposed to our regular way of doing it.
That, and we set some of the Apple store's laptops and iPhones to this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ndx_IdlUQU
Good times.
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