Porn hack targets SLO box store 

Shoppers perusing the aisles at the San Luis Obispo Target store on a recent Friday got a lot more than clothes, cards, and candles.

A few minutes before noon on July 10, customers there got a wild, unusual Target experience. The store’s sound system broadcasted the sound of what appeared to be a male and a female engaging in vigorous sexual activity. The unauthorized audio broadcast of pornography sent employees scurrying around the store before evacuating customers to the sidewalk outside.

“The entire staff—you can tell they were incredibly embarrassed, and you can tell the store manager was livid,” said Lucia Novoa of San Luis Obispo, who was shopping at the store with her fiancé and 8-year-old son at the time of the incident. Before the episode, Novoa had run into her 86-year-old grandmother at the store, who took Novoa’s son off to another part of the store to find him a gift for his upcoming birthday.

Novoa and her fiancé were near the store’s electronics section when they heard something strange. It was a distinctly different sound from the usual music, which typically features artists whose music is sold in the store.

“All of a sudden we hear the electronics department, and it sounds like a TV malfunctioning,” Novoa said. “Then the words come out, and those are not appropriate Target words. You know Taylor Swift is not saying that.”

Then, the fun really started.

The sexy noises spread from the electronics department to the entire store’s sound system.

“All of a sudden you hear a loud moaning, and then you hear a ‘You’re now listening to Porn.com,’” Novoa said. “And then it literally goes into the audio of a full blown, triple-X, nasty, nasty porn.”

The audio itself, and the words being said, were very vivid, to say the least, and involved repetitive use of words that start with the letters “f” and “p.” The broadcast continued for at least 15 or more minutes, Novoa said. During that time, she and her fiancé Derek Child located her son and grandmother, and Child ushered the boy and the grandmother out of the store while Novoa continued to the checkout line.

Mayhem ensued in the store. The prank hit a bull’s eye.

While representatives of the Minneapolis-based Target Corporation won’t say much, media representative Molly Snyder did say that the company is in fact taking this incident very seriously.

“We’re actively looking into it and taking appropriate steps to address the cause,” Snyder wrote in an emailed statement. Synder would not disclose what kind of audio system the store uses or if it was accessed from the store or remotely via the Internet.

“It made for probably one of the best Target experiences ever,” Novoa told New Times. “Highly entertaining. Two thumbs up.”

-- Melody DeMeritt - former city council member, Morro Bay