I was once a teenager. Really. And I think I was, well, kind of uncool. I was actually a cheerleader, which was totally not cool in the late 80s and early 90s. I wore acid-wash jeans and shoulder pads and penny loafers, which were cool. Then.

So when I tell you that this new Wal-Mart thing is uncool, I should know. Because it looks a lot like me, in 1987. That girl on the left here, in one of the videos on Wal-Mart's new The Hub social networking site for teens, she looks eerily like my best friend, Courtney. Wearing the exact same clothes. Let me say this: in 2006, that is not a good thing.

No, Wal-Mart isn't showing video from the 80s. It's trying to become some cool locale for tweens and teens. You know, where they can discuss fashion and music and -- well, probably not sex. As Brian White pointed out last week, there are so many rules about what teens can do with the home pages the company hopes they will create on the MySpace-type The Hub, why would any cool, edgy teen want to play here? To show off their facility navigating the fashion wasteland of the retail giant's stores?

According to Bob Garfield of Advertising Age, "If well-executed, such an effort might cultivate individual users, gather market intelligence on the group, destigmatize Wal-Mart as a declasse purveyor of unfashionable clothing and establish a beachhead on the web for the fast-approaching digital future ... [but] it's totally not well-executed. It's the most not-well-executed ever."

"We shouldn't tuck anything in, it's so not cool anymore," says the pink-tee and acid-wash-jeans clad "Ashley" on her featured video (clearly not produced, or written, by a teenaged girl named "Ashley"). Nope. And neither are you, Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart: so, like, totally, not cool originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Mon, 24 Jul 2006 17:52:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.