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Shopper Sues Local Piggly-Wiggly

PISTOL CREEK JUNCTION -- Julienne Joiboi is suing grocery store chain Piggly-Wiggly claiming that their aisle widths are discriminatory to the "girth-enhanced" community, in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The 647 pound Mudcat Falls woman was asked to leave the Pistol Creek grocery store the last week of June when a traffic jam of Fourth of July holiday shoppers estimated to be nearly a quarter of a mile long winding up and down the aisles from the fresh produce section all the way to the meat counter developed behind her and led to several incidents of shopping cart rage.

"Dairy products were spoiling in the cart and we had at least three patrons who suffered attacks of heat stroke," said store manager Angus Drucker , recalling the incident. "We opened the meat locker doors to try to cool things off, but it didn't work. The folks became surly and then . . . then all hell broke loose."

America's first true self-service grocery store, was founded in Memphis, Tennessee in 1916 by Clarence Saunders. In grocery stores of that time, shoppers presented their orders to clerks who gathered the goods from the store shelves. Saunders, a flamboyant and innovative man, noticed this method resulted in wasted time and man hours, so he came up with an unheard-of solution that would revolutionize the entire grocery industry: he developed a way for shoppers to serve themselves.

"Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness -- Ms. Joiboi has a constitutional right to shop in the Piggly-Wiggly," said her attorney, Steven Dallas. "Their offer to allow her to shop after hours to is naught but a cynical attempt to return this country to the days of a segregationist, separate-but-equal society and is simply unacceptable."

Dallas refused to confirm rumors that Joiboi would appear on an upcoming episode of The Jerry Springer Show.



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