Kelly Loves Target (But Not As Much As She Used To)

Confession: I used to be a total Target girl. Where I grew up in Indiana, there was a Target practically within walking distance. All of my affordable shopping needs were met beneath its sizzling red neon bullseye--hair products, sporting goods, cute undies. All the essentials, under one roof.

It was only once I went to college that I realized not every family automatically hit Target on the way home from church. At the time I was in school with my beloved sister (who writes this blog) in Washington, DC. The two of us were forever bemoaning the District's lack of a Target. Many of our friends at school puzzled over our obsession with this large discount retailer--but then again, many of them had never been to the fairytale land that is Tarzjay. For Target is a midwestern company (shout out to Minnesota) and all those many years ago its mastery of style + affordability had not yet swept the eastern seaboard.

When, after two years in school, my father hand-me-downed us his white old-guy Buick, and we finally had wheels, the first thing we did was dust off the map and plot a trip to the nearest Target (shout out to Green Belt, Maryland).

Soon after leaving DC I moved to the grand mecca of inconvenient shopping that is New York City, and once again I was adrift without my Target. New York is a place where haircare products, sporting equipment, and cute undies each get their own entire (expensive) stores. Saturday afternoon errands means dashing hither and yon, hauling dozens of shopping bags from subway platform to subway platform. We're not talking a civilized, climate-controlled Target experience here--we're talking elbowing your way crosstown through mass humanity. We're talking survival mode.

I mourned Target. I spoke of it often to friends, with a longing heart.

To make matters worse, around that time, mysteriously, advertising for the store started appearing on billboards across the city. No actual Target retailer, mind you, just lots and lots of billboards. Tormenting me. Then one Christmas, randomly, the signs started announcing the arrival of the Target Boat, set to dock at Chelsea Piers just in time for holiday shopping. My best friend Stace and I were just Target-deprived enough to fall for the obvious marketing ploy. (See photographic evidence above.)

My last couple of years there, I discovered that there was a Target that could be accessed by taking the G Train to (gulp) the Queens Mall. Yes, that would be in Queens. And yes, I made that trip. Many, many times. (For those readers interested in my spiritual development, it was on the long subway ride to Target that, one Saturday morning, I first cracked The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle.) The year I was leaving NYC, the first Target store opened in Brooklyn--so hope was dawning for the city dweller. But alas, I was already on my way out the ever-revolving New York door, heading to brighter skies in Boulder, CO.

Where, once again blessed with a vehicle of my own and not one but two Targets on my drive to work, my love affair with Target promptly began to wane. (Such is my way in love and shopping. It is my curse to love only the ones who play hard to get...)

If you want to blame someone, blame McGuckin's. McGuckin's, the local hardware store that sells much more than hardware. They may not have cute undies, but they have just about everything else--including hundreds of adorable retirees in green smocks whose only job is to ask you if they can help you find something.

When I think about how sad I would be if McGuckin's closed up shop, benching all those cute little old men, it makes it very hard to walk into Target--the monolithic, the big-box, the national chain.

But I do still walk into Target--sometimes. Tonight was, in fact, one of those times. And my experience there led me to love Target once again. It was not the pimply teen in a red polo who accosted me as I passed the jewelry counter, wanting to know if I needed help finding anything. (I did not in fact need his help, for I was shopping with a purpose: shampoo, which I'll have you know is not available for sale at McGuckin's.)

What I loved was that, as I stood in the shampoo aisle, hemming and hawing between Pantene and Dove, I heard someone say, "Um, were you just on an Adyashanti retreat?"

And I remembered why I love Target--the Target in Boulder, at least. It's because as much as everybody loves McGuckin's, everybody still shops at Target. And because it's Boulder, that means you'll end up running into some guy who sat four rows behind you on a silent meditation retreat in California the week before--and that he'll say hi.