As Sunday night rolled around, I pulled out my phone and scrolled through Twitter when a picture caught my eye. Usually, my timeline is filled with

funny vines or pictures of food but this one was different. I clicked on the picture and it was of a normal teenager bagging groceries at Target. Of course, I brushed it off as nothing unusual, I mean the boy was attractive but nothing special, until I saw the retweets and favorites the picture had along with the caption “#AlexFromTarget”. I couldn’t comprehend why this average teen had over 10.5k retweets and favorites, and what had made him blow up so fast?

Nowadays, girls can make anything famous, from a cute dog wearing a hat to a boy bagging groceries. We like to call them the “fangirls”so I wasn’t too surprised while scrolling through the #AlexFromTarget tag on Twitter and seeing the variety of tweets saying “I need him in my life” or “Can I please date him?” I mean girls are girls, especially on Twitter. Then the chaos broke out, it started with the finding of his twitter, to the leaking of his number and ended up with death threats to his girlfriend. I couldn’t keep up with the millions of tweets that began to spill all over my timeline about this poor boy who didn’t even do anything to get himself famous.

The average boy that became the internet sensation is Alex Lee, a teen from Frisco, Texas that spread faster than a wildfire. According to “Urban Dictionary”, Alex from Target is “a hardcore pimp who recently gained fame as an Instagram sensation for reasons beyond the comprehension of any sane person.” And if you still don’t know who Alex from Target is, don’t worry, you’re not alone, I’m still trying to grasp the fact as to why he’s as famous as he is now. Alex was featured on the afternoon talk show, Ellen, on Wednesday, November 5, three days after the incident fell off. On the show, Ellen asked him what talents he had to which Alex replied with “well apparently I’m pretty good at bagging groceries.”

Not even Alex, himself understood his sudden rise to fame when he decided to play along with the twittersphere and tweet  “Am I famous now?” causing him to obtain over 200,000 twitter followers overnight and roughly 25k favorites on the tweet.

After a few more playful tweets, Alex from Target seemed to not be going away anytime soon, with the recent parodies and other forms of the tweet that started it all. There have been versions of #AlexFromTarget that have become viral as well, such as #FrankieFromStarbucks, #MattFromRedRobin, and the classic #JakeFromStateFarm. No matter what seems to be the case, teenagers have developed a shorter attention span and will always find a way to make the most out of trends on social media.