“I Love My Cub!”

Somewhere in the middle of the nation’s heated debate about gay marriage, a new billboard popped up on one of my usual routes. The ad, for Cub Foods, features two women positioned in friendly proximity to each other and to a bag of groceries. The tag line says, “Real People. Real Values.”

Wow, I thought. That may be the most progressive ad campaign I’ve ever seen. Good for Cub. Gay families are real families, whether the law acknowledges them or not, and everyone needs groceries. If you can’t make it to Massachusetts, walk down our aisles!

It hadn’t occurred to me before that in the cutthroat grocery market, ten percent of the population might have gone unattended as a targetable marketing group. Trading in on the media frenzy over one of the nation’s hottest buttons, Cub had found a fresh approach to vying for the Rainbow shopper.

A risky approach, no doubt, in a country that values its heteronormativity, and with an administration that insists on it. Could a campaign like this successfully lure the Queer Eye without offending those who are Touched by an Angel?

On the other hand, wasn’t it a little crass to coast a marketing campaign on the back of a struggle for basic freedoms? You can’t get married but you can get tomatoes?
Mostly, though, it seemed a brave nod of acceptance for what’s still billed as an “alternative lifestyle” instead of just family. Could this really be the case?

Had anyone else seen this ad? And what did they think about it? I asked a group of friends, by email naturally, and this produced a trickle of disinterested responses. Apparently, no one else had noticed it.

So I called Cub headquarters. “They’re supposed to be a mother and a daughter,” reported Chris Murphy, senior manager of public relations, after consulting with his staff. “Really? Because from the freeway, they look like lesbians,” I said. “It’s supposed to demonstrate the generations who have shopped at Cub,” Chris told me. But if that were true, shouldn’t they have included some little kids, some grandparents? “Well, I looked at it up close, and you can tell that one’s older than the other,” Chris said.

But whizzing by on I-94, they definitely didn’t look to me like mother and daughter. One looked possibly Italian, a bit of a fireplug, vaguely like Rhea Perlman playing Carla Tortelli on Cheers; and the other looked like, well, her pleasant Midwestern and perhaps only slightly younger girlfriend. Even in stalled traffic they wouldn’t represent a May/December romance. At best, May/July.

“Do you want to talk to anyone else at the company?” Chris politely asked me. No thanks, I told him. I had called hoping that “Real People, Real Values” meant what I thought it meant: that acceptance of life in its enormous variety should be our primary value, and that somebody besides the AIDS Walk organizers was finally brave enough to advertise it. But I pretty much figured even before I called that it probably didn’t. And the truth is, I live closer to Kowalski’s.
—Shannon Olson