Adult store chain World Wide Video and the Spokane City Council have recently settled a five year dispute by agreeing to enter a consent decree in federal court.
The agreement will require the stores to reduce the floor area devoted to adult material “to no more than 20 percent and inventories of explicit material to no more than 25 percent.” In addition, the decree states that “adult material must be partitioned from the rest of the business and access limited to adults. Advertisements cannot specify ‘triple-x’ but must use the words ‘mature products sold here’ and describe their merchandise as being for ‘mature audiences.’”
A recent story in The Spokesman Review reported on the agreement, saying that “the idea is to convert the stores, outwardly, to boutiques that emphasize non-explicit items such as clothing, gifts, lingerie and furnishings.”
“However,” reported Mike Prager, “a key provision of the consent decree -- and one which is no doubt seen as favorable to World Wide Video -- is that… ‘nothing stated herein shall be construed as a limitation on the percentage of profits of the business derived from the sale of adult oriented merchandise.’”
Another report by Nikole Dugger for The Daily Beacon noted that “in Tennessee, for example, a 2005 bill would have substituted percentage of revenue for percentage of inventory to determine if a retailer meets the criteria of an adult business.”
Bill sponsor Senator Tim Burchett (R-Knoxville) told The Daily Beacon that Tennessee adult businesses were “finding ways to evade the law” by listing adult items as less than half of their inventory.
Portions of this courtesy of the Free Speech X-Press, the weekly newsletter of the Free Speech Coalition. More info at www.freespeechcoalition.com.
