I was actually surprised that my kids didn't feel a little disappointed by the prank itself, because there was no, like, "big moment." Keeping on a game face and seeing their dad do something so... I don't know... ridiculous and silly and "daring" was obviously entertaining enough.

UPDATE: More from BrianD, in e-mail:

Now, granted, they didn't make everyone smile. :-) At least you could say that what they "showed those Best Buy employees" depended on which layer of the employee hierarchy you are referring to. The various "classes" of employees looked at the event through different interpretive lenses. The prank picked up a Rorschach's quality. As such pranks usually do. "What do *you* see?"

It is interesting how threatened some people, usually people in authority, become about objectively harmless things like a bunch of people all showing up wearing the same outfit. No one was "impersonating an officer", or acting unruly, so there are no complaints on that score. Or, rather, the only complaints that could be be made is that the folks running around in blue shirts *could* impersonate a Best Buy employee, or act unruly.

However

(1) If the intent was to defraud, they'd send one or two fakes, not dozens.

(2) If your security system relies on the scarcity of blue shirts and khaki pants, I don't want to see how your data base is secured.

(3) Very few civil liberties would survive that standard. "You can only do foo if there is no way you could do mischief that way."

(4) Freedom of speech includes defending speech you don't want to hear. But that isn't just politically controversial speech. . . it also includes silly speech. It is interesting how silly much political discussion becomes. . .. and at the same time. . it is interesting how quickly silly pranks pick up a political dimension.

Well, to me, it looks as though the "point" was to rile up the security guards and go "Ha ha, look at the security guards freaking out over a bunch of people doing perfectly legal stuff." Well, are we supposed to believe that the security guards overreacted? What if we were in their shoes? Do we imagine we'd act any differently, confronted with this situation? I'd like to think it would occur to me that such people are far more likely than not to be up to no good—to sabotage the customer experience, for example, or to sneak into the stockroom, or to make a huge scene of some kind that would attract the news media and be bad for Best Buy's PR. I can't conceive, for example, of being a security guard and looking at all the infiltrators in the store and reacting any way other than swiftly booting them out. I'd expect to be fired if I just sort of giggled and let them do their thing, and rightly so.

So many of these demonstrations of "people power" or whatever are so laser-focused on their own viewpoint because it's the only way it makes sense to do what they do. If they stopped to put themselves in the shoes of the people they're pranking, who are just going about their business and making the best decisions they can, they'd probably shuffle off in shame instead of tormenting these poor underpaid worker bees. I've come to believe that most things that occur in the world can be broken down into perfectly rational responses by all the individual players—things might look chaotic or overwhelming on the macro level, but each person in the machine is just taking the information available to him and making whatever decisions seem best in his frame of reference—and looking at it that way, I find it harder than ever to subscribe to conspiracy theories and such, just becase the Occam's Razor response always seems to work out so well. Things happen for a reason—not because of fate, but because of people just doing what people do—and absent a huge and localized change in human nature, I have a hard time imagining how any major event that depends on individual decisions could go differently than it ever does.

Probably that's what gets to me about this prank: it does represent such a huge and localized change in human nature. It's people deliberately acting in a way that any rational actor would find threatening or at least worrisome, and then jeering at the "normals" for reacting like I imagine any rational actor would. I mean, what do they expect to happen? That their act of social engineering would spontaneously spread throughout the city and everyone would burst into highly illogical but joyful acts like bartering poetry for coffee and giving people free piggyback rides to work? Society works the way it does because we've all figured out what stimulus-response decisions make it sustainable with the least hassle and energy expenditure; if there were an easier way to live, we'd be living that way already thanks to thermodynamics. If people think they're going to inspire the world to be a more magical place, they're welcome to try, but I hope they aren't going to be too miffed when they fail.