Cargoes of Gold, Silver, Precious Stones and Pearls

T, The New York Times Style magazine, is filled with ads for stuff a good 99.999% of us will never buy, like a $47.5 million 5th Avenue penthouse, $9,000 sofas and other luxuries that make you shake your head in bemused wonder and simultaneous disgust. I enjoy some of the pictorials of cool architecture, but there is a level of pretentiousness within this magazine that causes me to pick it out of the paper first thing, because I know that every ad within competes with the next, where a simple chair, shoe, stove or clock is treated as a one-of-a-kind museum piece. Maybe I'm just jealous of the exceedingly rich, but I like to believe that if I had millions of dollars, I still wouldn't spend $10,800 on a Pergamena Folding Camp Bed.

So it was kind of nice to see lowly Target take out a detachable 8-panel brochure in this week's edition, highlighting what they call Design for All^® which featured "great design from A to Z."

I'm sure your average Central Park West socialite wouldn't slum at Target unless they had a real emergency and a handy disguise, but the ad artfully conveys that great design need not be expensive. (The item chosen for the letter Q was the Q-tip. A simple design and a great invention.) And if you're the kind of person who looks at my Vietnamese-made rubberwood workstation here at home and determines that I'm a cheap, swamp-dwelling Target shopper who probably still prefers the Levi's^® brand for jeans and spends zero dollars on haircuts, well...you' d be right.

Now, maybe while Target is so focused on cool design that functions well, they can find a new vendor to supply an alternative to those broke-down red plastic ghetto shopping carts. I've yet to push one that didn't have a bad wheel and a weird clunking noise.

Title of this post taken from here.