Is Being At Target With No List Actually “A Vibe”?

I’m crying, again. Maybe you can relate. I’m at my local Target trying to soothe the wounds of a breakup and, I realize, have ostensibly turned myself into a projection of everything I hate about our current culture.

“Wait, you’re at Target right now?” my friend Marguerite asks me through the phone. “Like, sitting in the parking lot?”

“No,” I say as I sniffle and walk across the shiny yet battered floor of the home goods aisle. “I’m going to the grocery section to find the mango kombucha.”

“You got a list, or you just vibing?” she asks.

I stop.

A couple weeks prior to this, in the grips of a depression-fueled Instagram scroll, I stumbled upon a plain black square with white text that simply said: I be at Target with no list, just vibes.

Needing to take my happiness where I could get it, I reposted this image and giggled as if I had come up with the masterpiece myself. The steady dopamine drip by way of red notifications throughout the day reminded me that, when all else fails, people will always respond to a humorous and relatable meme. Much more so than my honest sharing of how sad I was over the breakup, which I’d posted about before the Target meme, and led me to question — anecdotally, aware of the many variables — why one schema elicited more reactions than the other.

Maybe, I presume, we’ve become so immune to the constant tugs at our attention from GoFundMe campaigns asking for financial assistance for our friends who can’t afford healthcare, or our minds have been bled dry by the continuous onslaught of political upheaval and dread over the pandemic, that just a whiff of lighthearted humor might fill our days with sunshine and push us to assert our elation in the form of a laughing emoji.

There’s a cynic inside me who wants to be upset at my peers, my generation, and the tech companies who’ve helped to chisel away at our brains, for finding such puerile comedy so stimulating (although I am in constant awe of our focus-splintered modern social media parlance, and its ability to condense substance into such bite-sized morsels as idk or vibe or bet or flex or slay or lowkey, and to have another human being actually able to interpret the intended meaning — and, dare I say, “mood” — of these expressions).

Whether the human attention span is evolving or dissolving is a hotly contested issue. There are those that spew the “our attention span is less than that of a goldfish” line like gospel, and the more academic argument that it is simply mutating to adjust to the constant flow of information. Whichever stance you take, the facts are that Americans spend most of their lives staring at screens, they spend an average of 2–3 hours on social media a day specifically, and the amount of books one reads is directly correlated to their socioeconomic status, with a quarter of Americans not even reading at all.

To state this in a cantankerous way of disparagement towards people finding simple pleasures in a silly meme, however, would make me a bad person — because who am I to judge what brings others joy, so long as they’re not hurting someone else? — plus…

No matter how much you loathe meme culture, being at Target with no list is very much “a vibe.”

Marguerite’s joke causes a break in my sadness. I laugh and forget for a moment that I’m in a packed building during a pandemic, trying to purchase a product I don’t need just so I might check out of my current reality.

A staff member walks by. The flow of her own breath shoots up through the flimsy cloth mask she has on and fogs the glasses covering her eyes.

Perfect, I think, I’ll ask her to check the back for more mango kombucha.

She walks towards the beverage aisle to restock some rosé when, BAM! A bottle slips out of her hand and smashes all over the floor.

I cancel my plan to bother her about the kombucha, since she clearly has more pressing issues to tend to. Marguerite asks about the commotion and I describe the scene, although in my head, what I really thought was: “Mood, lol.”

A cursory glance at what Target has done to the collective consciousness isn’t very surprising. If you wade through the #TargetAddict and #TargetProblems hashtags on Twitter, the characters at the forefront of the conversation are mostly white, and mostly female (although, as a straight Mexican-American man, with many friends of color, some of whom are queer, I can say firsthand that the experiences described here do transcend certain identities; it’s just that a majority of the chatter online skews white). More than half of their Twitter bios contain some variation of their positions as a “content creator/marketer,” along with the popular use of the common noun “human,” next to other identifiable markers such as “mom,” “wife,” and “lover,” and it’s not hard to imagine looped cursive versions of these words carved into wooden signs that are then sold in the home décor section at Target.

The throughline of these tweets and conversations, which are remorsefully sarcastic in tone, is that to walk into a Target means you’ll overspend on products you didn’t even know you needed, or you’ll waste inordinate amounts of time inside the store on the hunt for these enigmas.

You know, the whole “no list” vibe.

It’s clear that to pronounce you’ve spent lots of time and/or money in a Target is just as common a symbol as the other fractured communications of our era; the sharing of your desire to unnecessarily shop at Target has almost become synonymous with stating “I need a drink.” A selfie at Target describing your intentions to buy Halloween decorations for your home in November is a vibe that the initiated immediately get. Just like you might get that the word “mood” translates to “the stimuli I just encountered triggers an emotion I can’t narrow down, so to be humorous and avoid description, I’m just going to say ‘mood,’” you get that somehow spending hundreds of dollars on products you don’t need on a whim is a narcotic-like affair that insulates you, and all the other humans and lovers, from an ungentle world.

According to the label I’m staring at, Ensure is the “#1 Doctor Recommended Brand” of nutrition shake (which means meal replacement shake, a.k.a. what they give to the elderly and/or anorexics who don’t eat). It’s a chalky paste that tastes less like strawberry or vanilla, and more like a tepid lotion.

I grab a 24-bottle case priced at $35, and it’s clear to me that the vibes are now off.

I’ve lost my will to track down the mango kombucha and, settling into reality, place the more pragmatic product in my cart. The meds I take, combined with the weight of the breakup I’ve just gone through, have me battling bouts of anorexia, and I need to ensure nourishment. I walk down the ends of the supplement and beauty aisles, where the sales items are kept, and twist my neck to look towards the bedding section.

Do I need a pillow? I ask myself.

I don’t.

Utterly confused, I stare back at the items in my cart: shakes, a pizza wheel, organic face wash, two candles, dry shampoo, and something called a “Tile Mate.”

I came here with nothing, with zero intention, and now I’m going to leave with this?

BAM!

An older Chinese man bumps into my cart. He nods apologetically, and as I nod back, I come to the conclusion that objectively, there really isn’t anything soothing about being in a fucking Target.

The recycled air that wafts through the heavily trafficked aisles is dense and artificial; the products you examine are overpriced (with the occasional deal here and there) and have been touched by many people throughout the day; the fluorescent lights beat down onto your body while it waddles through the clinically opaque landscape, and beeps from the checkout scanners shoot into your ears like darts. Not really my vibe, to be completely honest.

I drag my exhausted heart and limbs towards checkout. A short woman with a meticulously styled bob cut greets me. Her name tag says “Rosita.”

“Hi, Rosita, how are you?” I ask.

“Oh, joo know, yus’ working,” she responds, with a familiar accent in which the Ys are replaced with Js and vice versa.

“I do know,” I say. “You just get here, or are you almost done?”

“Almost done,” she says while scanning my pizza wheel, “Then I take the bus home.”

“Oh, where do you live?”

“South Central,” she responds.

If you look at a map of LA on Google after searching for “Target,” you’ll notice that in the densely populated area of South Central, where a majority of Los Angeles’s true working class reside, all of the major stores are on the periphery by about 4 to 5 miles. This doesn’t seem that far, but the competition for local jobs is likely more fierce, which is why — I assume — Rosita is at this location, 14 miles away from home.

I stare at Rosita’s dark brown eyes, and think about my grandmother: a hardened broad who grew up in Texas in the ’50s, and was of the “get smacked on the hands with a ruler until your nails crack at the cuticles for speaking Spanish in school” variety of Catholics, who changed her last name from Valenzuela to Jones as soon as she could, and who taught me how rude it is to ask a woman her age.

From my estimate, Rosita looks between 65 and 70, a high-risk age group in the current health crisis. I think about the many exposures she’s subject to on her commute from our city’s working nerve to the populated walls in which we stand now, to serve a never-ending river of people. Perhaps she has a son my age, who’s also at work, without the ability to take hours out of a Tuesday afternoon to spend money from a bank account unaffected by the economic downturn, and which was earned by writing at a desk in the safe confines of a home office. Or maybe he’s too busy on his own commute to take a “mental health day,” scroll maniacally through Instagram, and land on a meme about Target, which drives him to end up in front of someone like Rosita, checking out items that are mostly just emotional shrapnel.

Rosita gives me the receipt. I thank her, squirt a glob of sanitizer on my hands, and head for the door.

My phone buzzes.

It’s a text from my friend Andrew, who just sent a meme to my group chat that says:

“Boomers call millennials crybabies, but throw a tantrum when they can’t export their .JPG as a .PDF…”

I send a laughing emoji, and exit back out into the world, just another human with no list; another lover running on nothing but vibes.