The Upper West Side’s Sticker Bandit is back!
The bandit, who had been quiet for months, pasted new stickers this week on the window of Duane Reade on 79th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, where the bandit says a window-front display has been collecting and displaying dead flies for weeks.
As you can see in the photo above, the stickers say “How Do I Feel About Dead Bugs?” with an arrow pointing to the dead bugs below. A picture of those bugs is below.
It’s a joke about the company’s “How I Feel” campaign. Get it?
If you haven’t been reading West Side Rag for the past few months, you are now asking yourself “Who the Hell is the Sticker Bandit?” In short, the bandit is a person who has been putting stickers on the windows of vacant storefronts and general eyesores with words like “This is Neighborhood Blight” since last year. The Rag first named this person The Bandit, and the person subsequently put up a website at www.stickerbandit.com. We printed the manifesto here.
As new restaurant Sugar & Plumm prepared to open a couple of months ago, someone pasted stickers warning that “Drunk Nannies” were on the way. It was unclear whether it was the work of the same person. “clever, huh?” was all the Sticker Bandit would say.
More recently, the bandit has lain low. Until now.
We asked the Sticker Bandit by email if he or she is worried about getting caught, and whether it’s even legal to paste stickers on businesses. The reply: “they are stickers, jeez. they seem to work.”
A customer service rep we contacted at that Duane Reade didn’t know what we were talking about when we called, and a two minute discussion yielded no new information: in fairness, it must be strange to hear someone calling your store inquiring about dead bugs, stickers, and Sticker Bandits.
For all of our Sticker Bandit coverage, click here.
All photos via Sticker Bandit.
Re: “How Do I Feel About Dead Bugs?” :
Well, here’s Renfield (1931 “Dracula”) discussing the topic, thanks to IMDB: :
Renfield: Flies? Flies? Poor puny things! Who wants to eat flies?
Martin: You do, you loony!
Renfield: Not when I can get nice fat spiders!
Arachnids rule!
At a MacWorld convention at Javits, Steve Jobs pointed to piles of “Intel Inside” stickers near the doors. They featured the image of a snail.
How did you email the sticker bandit??? How do you know it’s the same person as previous incidents?
Good question Lisa. I guess we can’t know for absolute certain because we’ve never seen anyone in the act of placing the stickers. But the person emailed us from the same address as in the prior incidents. Avi