"Target Excellence?" I don't think so!!!

You know what I've come to learn: Corporate America doesn't give a SHIT about you! Recently, I found myself reluctantly shopping at Target (I say recently, but technically is was about 3 months back,) and I used my debit card because I was under the impression that a multi-billion dollar company with branches all over the fucking world could keep my debit card number safe! Like so many other people now know, I (and by extension anyone else who was working under this seemingly safe premise) was wrong! They had someone break into their severs and steal not dozen, not hundreds, but thousands of card numbers! Of course, their Public Relations team thought that this was information best not publicized to all of those thousands of people who made the mistake to trust them. Instead, I had to here about it from my credit union, in an e-mail, weeks after the fact! Now, I commend my credit union (the actual ability to care about their customers was the main factor why I switched over from a “big bank” in the first place,) but who I cannot bring myself to forgive is this corporate giant who, like the banks in our recent economic recession, like to give us the impression that they are “too big to fail.” Well, I call BULLSHIT on that!

Target let me and all of my fellow consumers down big time. Now, here's the rub. I went to the corporate website to read the band-aid that they tried to put on this operational ax wound, and they did a very good job reassuring the public that they would be ever-vigilant to protect our information and they offered a discount to all the affected people. Except, if they were actually ever-vigilant in the first place, then I would not have had my information stolen at all. And, in the second place, I would not have had to get a call from my credit union explaining that Target failed in it's crappy excuse for vigilance.

Now I should mention a slight mistake that I made (since those I can forgive), I have two account with two different credit unions as a side effect of having moved from Sacramento to the Bay Area about two years ago. My first was through SAFE credit union which is local to the Sacramento area, and the one that I opened up here, which is local to this area since the previous was not, is at Patelco credit union. Now, the mistake that I made was when I hear about this snafu that Target had gotten me into in the first place from Patelco's e-mail a month or more ago, I thought that I had used my Patelco card when I went to shop at Target. Like any cautious consumer, I went to my local Patelco branch, and I asked them what I could do to protect myself because of this customer service debacle that Target's negligence had thrust me into, and they told me that they had cataloged all of the cards affected, and that mine was not among them. Since they seemed far more on top of the matter than the institution that caused the debacle in the first place, I decided to take them at their word and I considered the matter closed.

However, today I got a call from SAFE credit union who I had not spoken with, partially because there are none of their branches in the bay area like I said beforehand, but mainly because I remembered that it was the Patelco card that I had used. Anyway, SAFE called me, and living up to their name,they informed me that I had in fact used my SAFE card, and they noticed some charges that looked like fraud, so they were going to send me a replacement card that I could activate and receive a $5 credit to my account for my trouble. So, my mistake was that I had remembered using the wrong card. Though, my information is safe thanks to SAFE.

The overall point that I am trying to make is though I already possessed some very good reasons for never shopping at Target for the rest of my natural born life, I now have one that will prevent me from ever even considering setting foot on the premises of that god-awful, tacky edifice for as long as my lungs draw breath. In summation, I am boycotting Target for life, and I would suggest to anyone who had their information mishandled in this way that I have should join me in the cause. Let's face it, Target in a crappy place to shop anyway. Their food selection sucks and is overpriced, their clothes are a joke and overpriced, and aside from those two very compelling reasons, this long and drawn out escapade has proven to me beyond the shadow of a doubt that as a company, they simply do not give a fuck about the consumers that support them!

And on a slightly tangential point, I highly recommend using credit unions. I have used them myself for years now, and I have never had any problems with them whatsoever. Maybe as a society, we should all look into frequenting not these globally-funded hulking chain stores that have a stranglehold on the economy, but instead we should try to find stores locally that are owned by actual people who we can walk up to and shake the hand of, face to face. Between the extremes of making everything by hand and trusting our information to a faceless conglomerate of soulless CEOs, there is a world full of Mom and Pop stores begging to make our acquaintance. It's the personal touch that his country needs again. We have become slaves to the instant gratification afforded us by conglomerations of hulking corporations who can give us a crappy product, built in the third world, with a price that's marked up to about 3000% times the cost to produce it, that breaks about 11 months later so that we have to buy another one just in time for next Christmas. So instead of being a cog in their soulless corporate machine, why don't we go and get out coffee from that neighborhood place down the street, or go and buy our bikes from that corner store whose name you can't remember but pass 10 times a week. Individual expression is like a solid-gold unicorn these days. If corporate America doesn't want to keep our money safe, then let's see if David can slay Goliath one more time. At the very least, we can lift the little pebble that goes into his sling for him.