If you don’t know who #AlexFromTarget is, you probably aren’t a teenager on Twitter.
Alex LaBeouf, better known as Alex from Target, is a 16-year-old Target employee in Texas who became an Internet sensation earlier this week when a young woman tweeted a photo of him on Sunday.
It’s unclear how or why exactly the tweet took off but within hours it was retweeted and favorited thousands of times. By Tuesday, Alex’s own Twitter account had been discovered by the masses, and he went from 144 followers to more than half a million. Countless memes, Vines and more flooded the Internet, with teenage girls especially noting how cute he is.
The story got stranger on Tuesday when a marketing company, Breakr, claimed responsibility for helping the story go viral. On Wednesday, LaBeouf tweeted that he and his family had nothing to do with Breakr, and the original person who tweeted his photo denied any involvement. Target has also denied that the company somehow orchestrated the teen’s sudden fame, and LaBeouf on Wednesday told Extra that he is still working at Target.
No matter where his fame came from (will anyone ever solve this mystery?), LaBeouf appears to be taking it in his stride. On Tuesday, he taped a segment for “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” where she asked him if he had any other talents. His answer: “I can apparently bag groceries pretty well.”
