I heard the place was deserted, and the cars in the parking lot have certainly been sparse.  But you just keep on shopping there, if your desire to prevent women from having to access to contraception is strong enough to pay Ralph's ridiculous markup.  Personally, boycotting Ralph's has been the best thing that ever happened to my budget.  Now that I'm shopping at the Co-op and Fred Meyer, I'm saving a lot of money.

 really whether or not they would be hurt financially. I don't think we'll have that much of an impact. I actually shopped there though to try and help the little guy who owned smaller local businesses and now I just don't feel inclined to shop there. I never wanted the guy to go out of business, I just wonder if the folks inside wonder where I went to? Also, do you think it's busy because of all of the attention the store is getting lately? Do you think they'll still be that busy months from now? How many of us that aren't shopping there now are going to continue not shopping there? Sometimes it takes awhile to record financial impacts, judging simply on weeks ( particularly during a hot summer ) may not be the best bet in this scenario.

you don't state why in your post...why do you support the Storman's stand? 

Say for instance, if you are a woman (but you are not), but anyways, say you are, and you get assaulted and genetic material is inside you--are you OK with letting that genetic material start what is basically an unplanned preganacy?

That is what you expect these females to do--

Don't you have any respect for a woman'r right to chose?

Do you also support other causes that take away a woman's right to choose? Like female circumcison? Yeah, Gary, where are you at?

We need a coop pharmacy.

Things looked really slow at Ralph's this weekend then picked up Monday.... Maybe prayer does work??

The women are warning each other by telephone and word of mouth and email and in churches. Don't shop at stores that disrespect women's choices, in this case Ralphs and Bayview. My own observation is that most women want to make this choice privately without involving excuses or police or the threats and prohibitions of patriarchal values, for themselves, for their daughters, as women and women guides to other women in living. I actually liked Bayview and Ralph's so I hope they straighten this out before all the women shoppers leave permanently. Women tend to not go back to places where they or their sisters have been disrespected, even if the matter is rectified later. We are most of us fussy feminists on the inside. The F bomb feminists gather on street corners. The fussy ones write and call the F bomb ones later to thank them. Others will be silent and conveniently find other places to shop. But a merchant who takes on feminists should consider merchandising and selling what men like to shop for primarily. If this lasts long, we will get other alternatives to Ralph's and Bayview springing up very shortly. Good business people see niches and fill them quickly. By the way, I like Top Foods on the West side too for some of the gourmet items. Give them your requests for anything you used to buy at Bayview and Ralph's. I am suggesting those great frozen crab cakes. ^@^

I guess if things have never been better for Ralphs then we protesters and boycotters should just go away.  Clearly no one is paying any attention to us and we are probably helping Ralphs make lots of money, more than if we didn't call for the boycott.  Well, Gary, we are not going away.  We still need to educate more of the public about what is going on regarding Storman's attack on women's rights.  I suspect that you really don't know how Ralphs is doing.  If you want to shop at Ralphs, no one is stopping you.  Support Storman all you want, but in your heart you know what he is doing is wrong.

"I would make it impossible for the covetous and avaricious to utterly impoverish the poor. The rich can take care of themselves."
^@^

It is presumptive to assume what someone "knows in their heart."

We all know that many children are molested, both girls and boys. The same is true with rape and sexual victimization at any age. It leads to all kinds of problems as adults, both crime and bad choices. Why are we even asking women about their choices? Why aren't we watching our children and healing them before they finish growing, if we even suspect a crime. Heal the angry children and we heal the next generation. Just notice and learn to notice, and let some of the blame for past wrongs go. Yes we need to lock up the people that become criminals. No we don't need to blame the victims. We just perpetuate generations of wrong and damage with further wrong and damage. Let the women pray about their choices. Everyone else needs to quit making this such a painful choice and discussion for those women and men with trauma and bad memories. Some parts of living can't heal until we get angry, cry, and learn to live with the harm done to us and move on in peace and forgiveness.

Give women a choice and don't ask why they make it. Let the men talk among themselves about the hard choices faced by women family members, then, now, and what they want for their daughters. For my daughter, I choose what my mother fought to give me, the right to choose and the right to make it no one's damned business but my own. I trust my daughter with her choices. Why can't other people trust theirs? We can't be parents in charge of our children all their lives. At some point they need to choose their own values and live by them and with them. I hope she rejects a few of mine personally. Some of them were false. Some were good. Let her decide in her younger generation wisdom. Take what you like and dump the rest. Perhaps her generation will succeed with some of the peace making where mine failed or faltered or floundered. And human rights. And racism. And harm reduction. And people just plain getting along and trying to understand each other. Its better than it was in the 1950's and 1960's, but is it really anywhere near what any of us older ones wanted when we were young? I doubt it. I had a dream, many dreams, just like Martin Luthor King, and I still do. For my children and their children.

I really hope women get the equal respect and dignity they deserve within the human race and without the interrogation and red lettering. They didn't have it when I was young and working and they don't have it now. We are still arguing their broodmare status. Is it her fault? Prove it. Prove it with evidence in court. Talk about it. Be really ashamed of it. Are you sure you didn't ask to have this happen to you. What about all the women liars. Well if they won't talk don't listen. And if they have babies make sure we don't have to pay more taxes. Force them all to work. Force the fathers to pay instead of Uncle Sam. If they don't have fathers, well let them suffer in poverty and hope everything turns out OK. Make sure you send them to prison more and at younger and younger ages. Try them as adults. Build more prisons. Invent more offenses. We have a war on drugs, a war for oil, what else can we war about? Religion? I think we are doing that too. School? Where we live? Who lives beside us?

Just think about it. We need to work on a little more equality for the children too. At least in terms of basic needs. For now, give mothers and would be mothers those choices. And we ought to look toward the family values of the cave people who managed to get along together in one cave, or so I hear. They did have to spread out and get more caves. Study the old cave drawings for family values and see if we can reinvent some ones that allow us to get along better. I wonder if cave people had NIMBY and let other people sleep outside in the cold because they weren't sure if they could trust them to be good people or not. I wonder if they shared food when food was scarce or helped heal each other just because someone was hurt.

Our true and best family values may be those we had in the cave and those we still have. Same with religious. The common cultural denominators, not the isolated regional differences. Our human race is on the way to extinction, along with much of the planet, if we don't figure out how to live with each other and let each of us have choices. A few basic rules for living, but not this complicated architecture of judging everyone around us as having less choices than we would give our own children in the worst imaginable circumstances. We need to quit judging each other so harshly. Women are a good place to start. They generally represent about half of each generation in every species. Look at all their circumstances as a whole, and all the circumstances they create and must endure to have children. Quit judging and start supporting and healing.

If you really want to make this thinking hard to think about, start with the women in prisons and the women drug users. What happened to them? Were they born of bad seed? How didn't we protect them? Can we do something today that should have been done long ago? Can we help them help themselves? Women's choice over birthing is only part of it. Women's lack of choice over conception is a bigger part. Not keeping children safe or provided for is another bigger part, their children, or their lives as children and young women. I think society needs to get over it and get on with it, not just the women. We can't legislate all the wrongs in living that can happen. We can quit being so harsh.