“Over 1.5 Million addicts comforted since June 2005!”
That’s the claim made by Red Cart Romance, the undercover yet wonderfully honest writer of Slave to Target, a blog dedicated solely to the serious “Slaves To Target [who] hide Target bags from their husbands…make up excuses to go to Target…[and] simply feel orgasmic by the thought.”
Besides, “a little red cart romance never hurt anybody”, right? At least that’s the tag line of the popular blog whose logo features a handcuff encircling Target’s famous red dot.
Getting on Blogebrity’s B list
Red Cart Romance seems to have a predilection for handcuffs, as well as witty and fun writing to boot.
“So when we heard about the site Blogebrity,” the Slave to Target writer blogged on a February 23, 2006, post “we wrote them and said ‘Who’s bedpost do you have to handcuff yourself to these days to get on Blogebrity?’
“[Blogebrity] replied with: ‘You have made the list!'” Red Cart Romance wrote, and then continued on with much of the chutzpah and braggadocio that has made her blog so addictive in and of itself.
“We made the B list!!! Not C! B!” she exclaimed, continuing to wonder, “Now, not sure what we have to do to get on the A list…but I am willing and able. As Melanie Griffith said in Working Girl, ‘I have a head for business and a bod for sin.'”
Blog by Numbers
It’s that type of unabashed and smart humor throughout the posts on Slave to Target that has made the site so compelling in only a little over a year since the blog began.
Considering the thousands of hits SlaveToTarget.com receives each day, combined with the no-holds-bar voice of Red Cart Romance, it’s easy to see why Forbes deemed the Slave to Target site a “best of the web” in a review.
“Who better to blog about the bulls-eye bazaar than two Target addicts,” Forbes noted, calling the folks behind Slave to Target “self-described work-at-home moms” who can’t resist the pull of going into their local “Tarzhay” (the fancy faux French pronunciation of Target) or shopping online and dropping at 100 bucks each visit then hiding their booties in the car till hubbies fall deep asleep, at which point they sneak the red-dotted bags into the house.
Wait a minute…hold the phone. Two Target addicts? Just how many women were behind the Slave to Target operation, I asked myself. Then I decided to contact the mysterious woman behind the blank profile on the avatar to find out more.
The Woman Behind the Handcuffs
“Hey Red Cart Romance,” I wrote in an email to the author of Slave to Target, ready to get down to the bottom of just how many folks write her successful and addictive blog.
“How many of there are you?” I asked. “Just one? Tell me all about it.”
“Just me!” Slave to Target answered.
Next, I wondered how deeply her anonymity ran. Was Slave to Target’s addiction so complete that even the man sleeping in bed next to her was blissfully unaware of her shopaholic blogging?
“Does your family or husband know who you are?” I asked Red Cart Romance next.
“Yes, they think it’s genius,” she answered.
Good, I thought. At least Red Cart Romance didn’t have to fear the type of familial exposure that Heather B. Armstrong, the uber-pageviewed author of Dooce.com experienced when her brother showed her blog postings to their father and he stopped speaking to Heather for three months.
But maybe Red Cart Romance had a different, more global and corporate type of fear of being outed. “Do you ever fear exposure?” I asked Slave to Target next.
“Sometimes,” she admitted, “but Target knows who I am.”
Double good, I thought. As long as the corporate leviathan already knew her identity, Red Cart Romance has already overcome a major stumbling block and avoided the kind of enmity that the Pink Truth blog butts up against with Mary Kay.
In fact, instead of working to shut down the popular Slave to Target blog, authored by a woman whom Fast Company calls “a wild-mannered consumer that considers a visit to Target retail therapy,” Target has smartly thrown an undisclosed amount of ad revenue her way.
“Target’s response? They bought advertising on the blog,” Fast Company wrote about the company’s wise reaction to not being able to control the fingers of one of their biggest fans – who simultaneously is at times their biggest critic.
“Slave to Target might not like everything Target does or sells,” Fast Company noted, “but rather than trying to quiet her down, they wisely ‘enable her addiction.'”
My Guest Blog Post
Red Cart Romance wasn’t the only one having an affair with Target. While scanning her blog as research for this article, my eyes honed in on a recent post by a guest blogger.
“Love the guest blogger idea,” I wrote to Red Cart Romance, my breath swelling with the same type of anticipation she might get over discovering a Tara Jarmon puff sleeve tee on sale.
“What’s your criteria?” I asked. “Can anyone guest blog? I love Target too…in fact, I think I’m headed over there today.”
To give Red Cart Romance further impetus to give me a shot I closed with: “Check out my writing and let me know if you’d like another guest blogger: http://paulamooney.blogspot.com”
“Hi Paula,” Red Cart wrote back. “No criteria really, just give me the post HTML in its entirety for blogger format and I will post it. I am so busy these days I haven’t been able to blog but I don’t want to abandon the website!”
My heart swelled. What a fabulous – and still anonymous to most of the world – woman to allow me to guest blog on such a heady site. As soon as I jetted the HTML stuff over to her, Red Cart Romance put up my post about how Target’s bargains got me through a birthday party attended by moms with money.
And I, along with millions of other Target consumers out there, hopes SlaveToTarget.com will keep comforting millions more.
