Target’s Backdoor Sale
Published 20 years, 1 month pastSo how long before this gets turned into a boycott campaign by the high-morals crowd? Because, after all, Target is clearly promoting a homosexual lifestyle by offering this item. (And just in case they’ve deleted it by the time you read this, here’s a screenshot for your delectation.)
A few quick observations:
- Only $35.96! And that’s 10% off! Plus you qualify for free shipping!
- The downside, so to speak, is that it won’t be available for another 4-8 weeks.
- At least it’s been correctly placed in the “Entertainment” section.
- “no picture available” — that might well be a good thing.
- Under “Features”, it says ” See description for information.”; under “Description, it says “See features for information.”
Thanks to Alex Kadis for passing this along. Er, so to speak.
Comments (36)
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[…] ning| humour
While reading Eric Meyer’s site this afternoon, I ran across this post which just made me laugh. N.B. For the uninitiate […]
See also: Items you would never see in Wal*Mart.
Eric,
If you put this on your list, I can buy it for you because you seem to want it.
It looks like Target got some Code from there Amazon Partner – Or Target sells porn DVD’s.
Hmmm… I wonder if that is a good price or if we should shop around a little.
Anyways, I also wonder if the product is made in China. God bless the USA, we always find a way to open new markets.
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Naughty Target
Cruising Eric Meyers Blog, I noticed his latest post from about an hour ago. It seems Target is getting a little risque with its merchandise, or as one comment had mentioned, they got some lines crossed with their partner, Amazon.com. Either way, you j…
Replace target.com with amazon.com to get a bit more information.
What’s homosexual about that? Can’t good christian het couples enjoy it as well?
I thought this site was a CSS resource.
Well, you know, Al, “C” and “A” are so close together in the alphabet that some slippage is bound to occur. Um, once again, so to speak.
I agree with you, Ryan, but many moral crusaders would not. Anything sex-related they don’t like usually gets branded “promoting a homosexual lifestyle”. Heck, a family-planning clinic near me was accused of promoting homosexuality, among other things. Checking for STDs and providing treatment for same, and providing birth control medication, promotes homosexuality? Yeah, okay.
Thanks, Jonathon, for the URL-substitution information.
I’m ….glad? you enjoy it.
(the link I mean)
Since when? …. I submitted it to his Funny Bits
The Amazon site has 12 used & new from $22.95. The mind boggles! Used?
Things get only weirder at amazon. See click the link to the target page, replace target.com with amazon.com and scroll down: someone reviewed this product with the headline “an altar boy’s daydream!”. WTF?
Gradually….. losing….. respect…. for this site. What’s with all the political/sexual stuff lately? So the election didn’t go the way you wanted…. So the majority of America doesn’t want homosexual marriage…. let’s get back to the tech stuff…..
Or maybe you could at least separate this from the CSS material? That way we can get great CSS material without the political stuff. And people who agree with you can get the political/sexual crude humor stuff if they still want…
John, a thought like this crossed my head to day. It should be possible to get feeds for a blog only for certain categories. Only one site I know does this, Stupid Evil Bastard. SEB does this by offering a seperate feed for each category, as well as one for all of them.
But I like the randomness of “sex/politics” one day, then “javascript/css/standards” the next.
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US Online Commerce Gone Wrong…
While reading Eric Meyer’s site this afternoon, I ran across this post which just made me laugh.
N.B. For the uninitiated, "Target"is a budget store chain – apparently they’ll sell almost anything!!
You can get any category-only feed you want. For example: http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/category/css/feed/ will get you all of the posts in the CSS category. I haven’t set them up explicitly, but they’re there anyway. That’s one of the built-in joys of WordPress.
I should at some point get to reorganizing my categories so that all the tech stuff is under a generic Tech umbrella, and everything else falls under a Personal umbrella. I was intending to do that so that some of my non-technical friends could skip past the boring tech stuff. It never occurred to me that some might prefer a less personal site from my personal site, but I guess that’s the flip side of such categorization.
Frankly, though, this site is a reflection of who I am, what I think, and what I find funny. Don’t like it? Nobody forced you to come here. Granted, it would seem that if you manage to muster some measure of tolerance for a while, anyone will be able to shut out the parts of my voice that offend, thanks to feed categorization. I feel sorry for those people, since it would seem their only interest is in what they can take from me and not in who I really am–but hey, technology is a great enabler, isn’t it?
John –
Where’s your site? I notice you didn’t link to one. Maybe you could make your site the way you want it and let everyone else do theirs. Hmm…
I wonder if you could put something like this on lay-away.
And Eric, how dare you express your own thoughts on your own website with your valuable personal time. You should only say what I want to hear!!! You better learn your lesson and figure what I like to see you say, or I might just… turn off the computer, get a girlfriend, and a life.
With all due respect Eric, it wasn’t the content of this post and comments that turns me off, it is the tone.
First you talk about people who would be offended by this as needing to be a member of the “high morals crowd”. Quite a blanket accusation. Quite an arrogant one too. Then in the comments you speak of “tolerance”? Maybe you might want to look in the mirror before throwing that word around?
Look, it IS intolerable to hear about the neighborhood family-planning clinic. But two wrongs don’t make a right. But FWIW I do applaud you for publicly speaking your opinion. And while I personally would have worded thing more, um, inclusively by not indicting and typecasting annyone who simply might think that Target wouldn’t be the one to introduce an “anal massager” to their 7 year old boy – I will continue to read what you have to say.
PS: this is my first comment in this thread. I’m not the Dave who previously commented.
You know what cracks me up? People who are too self righteous to enjoy a joke, or at least ignore it and let someone run a site how they want to, instead those people criticize what someone else does that has no affect on them.
There is no way this item is clearly homosexual. I once saw a program which said one of the biggest buyers of strap-on dildos were married couples.
I like the mix of topics on this site. It’d be boring if it were all CSS. (Not that Eric’s CSS topics have ever been boring.) Watch out when talking about your radio show, Eric! That ain’t nothin’ to do with CSS. And Zeldman had better stop posting pictures of his newly-born daughter – after all, his site is supposed to be about web coding, right? And so on, yawn.
Sigh. Disagreeing with a point is fine if argued politely. Other people trying to tell you what you should and shouldn’t post on your own site is simply ridiculous.
For what it’s worth, the ability to get a more rounded picture, a fuller story, is the glory of this medium. When I was first at college I had to take, on face value, the words of the authors of my books despite knowing nothing about them.
These days I am provided background information which is marvellous. An ongoing discussion of your areas of expertise is wonderful and inspiring. Including in that discussion your interests, motivations and opinions serves to provide context.
I would rather lose commenting from this site than lose your freedom to post whatever the hell you want.
I don’t want this site less personal. I like the real side of blogs and that’s why I read here in addition to reading books or other tech sites. We get to know the man behind the code, and I wouldn’t want you to hesitate when you want to say something.
But that doesn’t mean that I won’t disagree with certain things. :o)
I reacted a little rashly because of the sarcastic tone of the post, and for that I’m sorry. This post was meant to get a reaction out of someone like me, and it did.
Apologies,
–J
Target is not promoting anything. Their shopping cart is powered by Amazon.com, and this is one item that’s on Amazon.com. The fact is, that while Amazon has enough information to determine what this product is – and reviews of the product (which must be read, I’m tellin’ ya, but only if you enjoy “gutter humor”) – Target does not. So let’s look at that.
Only the words “Anal Massage” and “DVD” appear on Target’s site. In time, they will probably disappear – it will be filtered out of Target’s shopping cart. Just my guess.
And the truth of the matter is that Eric is correct about the “High Morals Crowd” if he’s talking about the people I think he is. There is a group of folks out there who have nothing better to do with their lives than display their high moral tone to the world at the expense of others. I’m talking about the people who live for a petty fight.
I’m not talking about those who do what they think is right, and live by a certain code. Those people I respect. The people I’m talking about are on both political sides and we all know who they are.
These folks look for something small like this to start a “movement.” Nothing dangerous here, just two words. But it’s not inconcievable that one of these “We’re protecting you from you” groups would latch onto this and make it into much more than it is.
Personally, I thought it was amusing that the people who run Target’s end of the site missed it. Further, I had to giggle at the idea that a company that is so obsessed with image that it is banning Salvation Army Santas because it give the impression of “panhandling,” let this one slip through.
Well, looks like they filtered it out, as predicted. The data slip-up with Amazon makes it more understandable, but when I first became aware of the page, I didn’t know that was the situation. I figured it was some kind of test record created by an intern or programmer with a juvenile sense of humor, and that it had escaped into the wild, because security through obscurity is no security at all. Kind of like the Netscape employee who used an insulting filename for a picture of President Bush, and got fired as a result.
Keith’s right on target here (see, I can make bad jokes that don’t involve sexuality!). To get a sampling of the folks he’s talking about, just search snopes.com for “boycott” and get a heapin’ helping of boycott campaigns based on nothing, or practically nothing, or even an apparent willful disgregard for the truth, from both the “restrictive” and “permissive” wings of social activism. As can be seen, it’s taken a lot less than this to touch off yet another round of “those who know what’s best for us / must rise and save us from ourselves.”
In all seriousness, the post wasn’t meant to provoke any reaction except a few chuckles. My derision toward the “high-morals” crowd would perhaps have been better phrased as the “high-outrage” crowd, the very folks Keith was talking about, but in this case either descriptor is apt. And as I didn’t see “DVD” on the Target page, it looked like they were offering… well, let’s call it “personal service”.
Another Screenshot
I came to Eric’s Blog for the CSS, I stayed for the other stuff. Speaking from the UK, it’s refreshing to hear a liberal voice from the US.
and that great ‘skwunch’ing sound, folks, is the sound of half of eric’s regular readers getting their panties in a twist (really, that … ummm … massage video would do wonders for all that tension), while the other half of us laugh our css off at them.
oops … c for a … happens to the most careful among us.
kurtis (laughing his … okay, i’m done with the puns … off)
Thanks for the laugh . . . and a great website. I *really* needed that laugh.
First anal massages. Now marijuana is for sale too.
… and now neither is “on stock”…
I don’t know you, Eric (but I know who you are from the DW forum), but you come across in your original post as every bit as self-righteous and intolerant as those of whom you speak.
They’re dealing with another kind of product now. Hm… so to speak? :)
The link no longer works.
But if you put ‘anal massage’ in their search engine, it pops up 3 ‘results’ boxes that are blank! sounds like someone at target did some creative editing due to unwanted attention.
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