Target hates your mom

Categories: Halloween
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Photo by ChrisGonzales90 via Flikr
Admit it: As a kid you might have coveted that fancy store-bought Halloween costume, but it's the homemade one you put together with your mom using a little creativity and some items from your closet that you remember most fondly. Heck, that DIY costume probably didn't even hamper your fun that evening anyway; the ultimate goal on Halloween is to come home with a pillowcase full of sugar, after all. In fact, we'd argue that homemade costumes are a rite of passage, perhaps even more so nowadays as folks look to cut corners on frivolous spending.

Unfortunately, Target did not get the memo, and commenters on YouTube are hilariously ripping them a new one for their latest commercial.

The commercial features a mother and her young son, who is wearing what is revealed to be a homemade Iron Man costume. She's enthusiastic, he appears stunned. The getup falls apart as she goes to get her camera. Meanwhile, in another dimension, a store-bought costume hovers in a sea of red. It closes with a tagline, "Life's a moving target."

The television spot, uploaded to Target's official account, has been receiving some pretty sarcastic/negative responses:

"Why spend time with your kid making something together for Halloween, when you can just goto Target and spend $19 for a memory that will last, oh say, two days? Way to go, Target! Spending time with those little rugrats is overrated, anyway."

"First the gays, now moms. Who will Target alienate next? Shame on you Target. I'd rather have a light velcroed to my chest by mom who loves me than 20 dollars worth of ugly."

"This makes me sad, there are not enough moms out there who would spend 5 minutes with their kids and then they mock the ones that do, jeez."

Though not all responses were critical:

"Fraking [sic] hilarious, I love this commercial. There nothing wrong with it at all. I hated some of the costume my mom made me wear and you can see it clearly in his eyes he hates what he has on. But still funny as hell. Great one love it."

And of course, being the internet, some comments don't even make much sense:

"I hope they don't replace this kid with Don Cheadle if they have to make a second advert."

Target has been doing a wonky dance in public for the past couple months. Some consumers were enraged and even moved to boycott the company after it became public that the mega-store was throwing money towards raging homophobe Tom Emmer's political campaign. While this television ad is hardly comparable to their earlier scandal, the public's eye-rolling reaction certainly suggests that it's another misstep in an already shaky year.

So is the ad offensive? Take a look below and tell us what you think.
 

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