For those of you who may be nearly as old, dumb and self-centered as I am, Alex from Target is the latest poster boy for an Internet gone wild. His given name is Alex Laboeuf, and he’s a 16-year-old from Texas who has been described as having Justin Bieber-ish looks. When he’s not otherwise engaged in looking Justin Bieber-ish, he bags groceries at a Target store somewhere in the Dallas area.
Last Sunday, or so the story goes, a young woman named Abbie took a photo of him bagging groceries and posted it on Twitter. The photo, was hashtagged, if there is such a word, #alexfromtarget and quickly attracted 114 followers.
Then 144 quickly became more than 600,000.
The websites of Time, The Washington Post and CNN wrote about the photo. The New York Times reported that the Dallas Morning News “tried furiously” to determine at which Target Alex was employed. In less than a week Alex Laboeuf, grocery bagger, has become Alex from Target, Internet star.
And no one knows why. Not even Alex. When he was flown to Los Angeles to appear on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” Ellen asked him if he had any special skills, such as singing or dancing.
“I can apparently bag groceries pretty well,” he conceded. (That’s not meant to disparage grocery bagging, by the way. Having been subjected by my kids to many of today’s most popular performers, I’ll take non-singing, non-dancing grocery baggers any day.)
But with Twitternet fame came the inevitable Twitternet backlash. Speculation began to be posted that there was no young woman named Abbie who snapped the photo and that the whole thing was some sort of publicity stunt by Target or a marketing startup called Breakr. Some people posted that Alex wasn’t all that good looking and was, in fact, “so ugly!!!” When it was learned that Alex had a girlfriend, one Twitterer twittered, “I will find you, and I will kill you.” “B_, no one likes you,” another twit declared.
So that’s the who, what, when and where of this story. I’ll let you try to figure out the “why.”
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