Stores May Now Know Too Much About Their Customers’ Fifty Shades Reading Habits

By Doug Barry | August 8, 2012 | 2:25am

Latest

According to Uproxx, this Fifty Shades of Grey masturbating kiosk is located in a Sainsbury’s, which is a chain of supermarkets in the U.K. that apparently specializes in dirty books and special vibrator batteries. Oh, and those shortbread cookies that are so maddeningly delicious. This display should remind everyone why the internet (and, by extension, e-publishing) is a thing — so everyone can look at their dirty books in private and make a more discreet battery-run later.

Now that the indie literary darling Fifty Shades of Grey has gone mainstream (it now boasts a classical music soundtrack), it’s probably all but impossible for you to enjoy it anymore. The novel about sadomasochism (pro-tip: if you use the word “sadomasochistic” to describe Fifty Shades, you’re halfway to a doctoral thesis about the metaliterary experience of reading E.L. James as well as a tenure-track position at Yale) has already sold more than 30 million copies worldwide, and is being prepped for distribution in 43 other countries even as we sit here not leafing through its titillating pages. Soon, readers the world over will be hiding their copies of Fifty Shades so that no one judges their literary tastes, which they’ll eventually realize is silly when they learn that everybody else is secretly reading the very same book.