teen walks into Target looking for a tie for a job interview. photo goes viral

[Demit]

226. You hold a pep rally with employees...

& remind them to be extra special nice to customers, because sales were down last year. Nothing unusual there, department stores hold pep rallies all the time. You tell them that spotters will be circulating & there will be rewards. A rewards program, nothing unusual there. Then you send out the spotters. Maybe the spotters are relatives of management. Maybe they think it's just an innocent management policy, to improve customer service via employees recognition, a sort of Candid Camera thing. Maybe they get a little something for their time. Maybe you hire the kid, maybe he's real. Who knows, nobody's found him. Nobody wants to. It's such a feel-good story, white people help black kid in the South, nobody wants it to be a setup. The photo gets posted to FB with gushing copy & goes viral (for how to get a FB post to go viral, there's advice all over google. It's actually kind of sad).

The tv station gets a tip, or one of their interns tasked with trawling the internet finds the post, so they send a crew to the store for video, for the usual human interest segment. It doesn't hurt that it features a local business, local tv stations are tasked with promoting local businesses. In the voiceover they make sure to say the Target name as often as possible.


The thing about "conspiracies," joshcryer, is that the people involved only have to have a little bit of information each to do their part. What they do, the small part they play, can be totally innocent or ordinary. People forget that not everyone has to be "in" on something for it to work.