Photo: Sean Wandzilak / Shutterstock
WTF?
By Monica Beyer — Written on Aug 18, 2021
We all love Target. You know you do. It's bright, colorful, and has the best stuff to waste your money on, and there's a ton of awesome crap you can buy for your kids.
Going with a small shopping list never works out — you always have a huge cart full of stuff by the time you pull up to the register. But for one California mom, she and her young twins got a pretty awful bonus surprise as they moseyed down an aisle:
Shopper Gina Young wrote:
"This happened at Target in Campbell, CA. Porn blasting over the intercom throughout the store. People offered to help me cover my twin's ears. Others threw their stuff down and walked out. Employees were running around everywhere. Picking and hanging up phones, which worked....for about two minutes before it started up again. People were screaming at employees, videotaping, some laughing some disgusted. It was terribly awkward."
As you can hear in the video, the store is inexplicably playing audio from a porno over the loudspeakers.
Gina Young writes that Target employees were running amok trying to get it to stop, but their repeated attempts failed. She reports that another woman offered to help her cover her kids' ears, but she rushed out of there ASAP and hopefully didn't hear or process much.
Her kids are young enough so they probably won't be permanently scarred by the sounds of porn. In fact, she writes that one of her boys asked if the woman was OK after they left. Gina is super-calm throughout the video and was likely pretty calm as she bought their stuff and left.
This is exactly what a parent should do in this situation — stay calm, don't freak out, but exit as soon as humanly possible.
But can we talk for a moment about how totally inappropriate this was? I have a pretty good and open sense of humor, but for some jack*ss to put something like this over the loudspeaker in a family-friendly store is inexcusable. Yes, her kids are probably too small to have been affected, but I don't think letting a grade-schooler or pre-teen hear porn on a shopping trip is ever OK.
We as parents have to have a healthy view of sex, and we have to understand that kids do grow up to have a sex life of their own. Sex should definitely not be regarded as shameful or weird, but introducing sexual pleasure via the PA system at Target isn't the way to go about it.
You wouldn't take your child to a porn film and turn his back to the screen, or play porn at home when he's within earshot. Of course, it's possible your own kid has heard you having sex at some point, but that doesn't mean having it randomly blare into his ears at the store is A-OK.
I'm sure Target is pretty displeased that someone chose to do this and had the knowledge and access to pull it off. It's not too much of a stretch that this viral video will eventually lead to someone losing their job (if it was an employee who was behind the whole mess). Maybe someone, somewhere thinks this is the greatest prank of all time, but overall, it's a pretty gross one.
Monica Beyer is a writer and editor. She has been featured in SheKnows, Medical News Today, Health Digest, MSN, and more. Follow her on Twitter.