Paper, plastic or performance art?

Maybe you've seen the video; it's all over TV news and the Web: Some U of M theater people broke into song and dance at Byerly's and put it on YouTube. How madcap! Like many "viral" videos, however, it was planned, a promotion designed to tweak the store's image as a place where you ask, "Where are the snails?" and they reply, "Free-range?"

You're supposed to think: What a crazy spontaneous place that grocery store must be! I will buy milk there. The cooler might be blocked by six people doing the Charleston and I could get a shoe in the face, but it's worth the risk.

Yes, Byerly's has a rather staid image. That's why I like it. I actually do most of my shopping at a place where "organic" means "things that came out of the ground," because times are lean. But when I go to Byerly's, I feel like one of those people who might, someday, need a $40 bottle of olive oil infused with tears of an opera star. They have a buy-one-get-one-free deal going on, but they call it BOGO. Guys: It's BOGOF. Buy-one, get-one-free is how it's supposed to work out.

Anyway. I like grocery stores because I was heretofore guaranteed that no singing and dancing would break out there. Oh, there's singing: The other day I passed a classic gray-haired granny type humming along with "Satisfaction" by the Rolling Stones, playing on the store's sound system. Music of her youth, after all. Forty-five years later, and she still can't get no.

There's dancing when someone leaves a cart in the middle of the aisle, walks 20 feet away, and everyone else has to move their cart around it without touching it, because that would give you rudeness cooties. But singing and dancing? Not to sound like a total killjoy, but I don't want to be drawn into a foxtrot against my will when I just want to get out of here with my eggs intact.

The next viral sensation? Besides the bird flu, that is? When the Shubert reopens as a dance palace, Cub employees will burst into the lobby and pass out Schweigert bologna samples. Thanks, YouTube; marketing will never be the same.

jlileks@startribune.com • 612-673-7858 • More daily at startribune.com/blogs/lileks