| Zachary Johnson 5. November 2014 – 07:40
Alex Lee—AKA #AlexFromTarget—is making the most of his 15 minutes of fame.
“#AlexFromTarget” has been tweeted more than 1. 5 million times since Sunday. The teenage cashier stopped by The Ellen DeGeneres Show Wednesday, days after he unwittingly became an internet meme.
“My manager came up to me and she showed me the actual picture,” he said. “I thought it was fake.”
According to Lee, “About an hour later these random girls I’ve never met before came in and showed me my Twitter page and it had like 5,000 more followers and I was just really confused.” Lee originally had 144 followers, but when the episode taped Tuesday, he said he’d amassed “about 555,000” followers.
“Do you feel now obligated that you have to tweet things out like you’re a big celebrity?” host Ellen DeGeneres asked. Lee nodded and replied, “Oh, my God…I just feel so pressured. Like they’re waiting…”
“Have you had marriage proposals?” DeGeneres asked.
“I mean, yeah,” Lee said, flashing his megawatt smile.
“Do you sing? Do you have any other talent?” DeGeneres asked. “We should take advantage of this.”
“I mean, I can apparently bag groceries pretty well,” Lee joked.
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Breakr took credit for making Lee a star Tuesday. The company’s CEO claimed it engineered a social media experiment, saying, “We wanted to see how powerful the fangirl demographic was by taking an unknown good-looking kid and Target employee from Texas to overnight viral internet sensation.”
“Truly, we never thought it’d go this far,” the CEO added.
Target, meanwhile, said it had nothing to do with the stunt that made one of its employees instantly famous. “We value Alex as a team member and from the first moment we saw this photo beginning to circulate, we shared that the Target team was as surprised as anyone,” the company told NBC’s Today.
However, there is discrepancy as to whether Breakr was indeed responsible for initially posting the photo. “Apparently there is a company trying to take credit for how the pic taken of me went viral,” Lee tweeted Tuesday night, after taping his TV debut. “My family and I have never heard of this company.”
(E! and NBC are both part of the NBCUniversal family.)
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