Friday, September 1

Fun with e-mail forwarding

I just received the following e-mail forward from a very sweet, well-intentioned mother of an Iraq vet. This is the same lady who didn't want to even go into Starbucks after a similar e-mail a few years ago.
> > > Look who owns Target
...
"Recently we asked the local TARGET store to be a proud sponsor of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall during our spring recognition event. We received the following reply from the local TARGET management: "Veterans do not meet our area of giving. We only donate to the arts, social action groups, gay & lesbian causes, and education."
...
Then as I dig further, TARGET is a French-owned corporation. Now, I'm thinking again. If TARGET cannot support American Veterans, then why should my family and I support their stores by spending our hard earned American dollars! And,have their profits sent to France. Without the American Vets, where would France be today? "They, most likely would be speaking German and trading in Deutsch Marks"
Sincerely,
Dick Forrey
Veterans Helping Veterans
Please send this on to everyone you know to let Target know we don't need them either !



Yeah! You tell 'em! I replied to let her know that Target is, in fact, not French (the pronunciation Tar-zhay notwithstanding). Didn't really go into the rest of it. Didn't want to make her feel bad. Doesn't it sound like a joke right away? Them there Frenchies and their homo-loving agenda? But it was a real e-mail. Check out the full e-mail and background, including Dick Forrey's apology to Target if you like. http://www.dcmsoft.com/rumor/story/target.htm

How do you handle things like this? Some might send a reply telling the sender to fuck off and stop being so stupid. Not my style.
Also, she's not stupid, just susceptible to an error most of us are, I think.

3 comments:

  1. You know, first of all it's sad that people are actually writing this stuff up knowing that it isn't true. Sadder yet, there are people who actually believe this crap. Really. What this is really about is the fact that Target has long been railed against because of its lack of philanthropic giving to ANY cause (whether liberal, conservative, or neo-Bush-fascist. It's a corporate descision that they have made. I heard a Target exec once justify it by saying "We could be like Wal-Mart and do irrepairable damage to the economy and try to make up for it by giving a tiny percentage of profits to charitable organizations. Instead we've just chosen to do business in a responsible manner and therefore insure that we don't need to give away money to make ourselves look good." Not his exact words, cause i don't recall, but it was something pretty close to that. Anyway the Target corporation is repsonsible of millions of dollars given to public schools across the country. Although that money doesn't come directly from Target. There's a whole "thing" happening behind the scenes there tht keeps that money from ever even hittin Target's hands so they don't really take credit for it. Whatever... I just really hate shit like this. Whether it's about gay marriage, Target, the Urban Lottery... etc. I once got so fed up with getting this crap every day that I made up one of my own (ten times more believable than anything I've gotten before or since) and mailed it out just so I could tell all my friends that forwarded it that it was a total lie when they came back to tell me about how sad the story was. I dunno why I'm still talking. I guess what it really comes down to is this... well intentioned or not the only people who believe this crap are idiotic sheep who can't think for themselves long enough to question something they want to believe. If we were all willing to just believe something because we want to we'd all be ignorant of the facts, solid in our mistaken assumptions, and at war with the world based on lies. Oh... huh.... see... people are fucking stupid.

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  2. P.S. I do it too.. My wife points out that I kinda said that Target doesn't give any money to charities... not true... they do give.. but not nearly as much as Wal-Mart, and all on a corporate level. The local stores do not give donations of any kind (that same NPR thing with the target exec i referenced earlier) implied that the reason for this is because charitable giving should be just that, and not marketing. If done on a local level it becomes more about advertisememnt than charity.

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  3. About the marketing thing: they used to make a big deal about the 5% back to the community thing - does anybody remember those signs in the stores? I do cuz I had to walk past them to get to the service desk to work. I don't have a problem with a company doing good works and telling people about them -- I just don't like it when they flog it to death.

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