Forty years after singer-songwriter Barry Manilow won the Grammy Award for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance for “Copacabana,” his melodic and still-popular music is now being used to shoo people away.
Away from the outside of a store, that is.
The pharmacy chain Rite Aid is trying to weaponize Manilow’s music against local panhandlers and vagrants in California.
A handful of Rite Aids in that state have been playing Manilow’s music outside their stores in an effort to get homeless people to set up somewhere else — as The Wall Street Journal reported a few days ago in a piece lightly titled, “He Writes the Songs That Make the Neighbors Cry ‘No More Barry Manilow!'” (That’s a play, of course, on Manilow’s 1975 smash hit, “I Write the Songs.”)
Customers had a difficult time entering those California Rite Aids due to the heavy presence of loiterers surrounding the door, The New York Post reported. Lisa Masters, a drummer from Long Beach, called the store to ask about it and said one of the employees explained it had been highly effective, the publication also reported. “His attitude was, ‘Would we rather have panhandlers or Manilow?’” Masters said..."
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