It surprises me sometimes how innocently naive people are. How people miss obvious jokes, parody and sarcasm online. I figured as more people use the internet, the less naive they'd be, but it seems like the opposite is happening. And the more obvious the joke, the more people seem to take it seriously.
On the mainstream Internet, you can't ever be sure. What you consider an obvious joke can actually be intended as 100% serious by the poster. Or it could be some small agency's "brilliant" plan at social media marketing targeting unsophisticated normies.
However the joke is spot on, since that image is not far removed from the general mess at a typical CVS. You walk in for your meds and are bombarded with a special deal on soda, makeup, want a beach toy? how about some junk food? oh wait here's some more cheap cosmetics to go with your passport photo… By the time you get to the OTC drug section that has the tiny selection of the same meds in 5 different brandings/packagings, you're already overwhelmed. The whole store is a UX fail.
As a side note, I'm fit and not diabetic but making people who struggle with glucose control walk past all these snacks is just evil—or ar the very least highly insensitive. Profit first, damn the sick! :(
The weird thing is that the url they use (for the sake of future readers, cvspharmacy.com ) is a broken site that just gives an error message, and has done so for a long time if the Wayback Machine is to be believed. Yet it at one point linked to the real CVS site.
I get a lot of spam email from something @cvspharmacy, maybe the real CVS (which I didn't know about until now) forgot to renew the domain and it was hijacked by spammers. Just speculating of course.
I'm not quite sure what they're trying to do there, but the link isn't real. It goes to cvspharmacy dot com, but the actual site is cvs dot com.
Incidentally, CVS Pharmacy isn't a shady internet thing, they're a longstanding US brick'n'mortar chain. I think this is supposed to be a joke, just a rather obtuse one.
hi, i'm melipone (OP). the cvspharmacy link was an obvious joke meant to parody people who plug links after something goes viral. i got it from my friend karl's page (@hammerfist3); it's in his bio, too. also, it's a dead link; how stupid are people lol.
How can one tell parody and real without knowing your background? It's just a random tweet to 99% of people who clicked here. Known as Poe's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law