It was a Tuesday. This matters because nothing interesting is supposed to happen on a Tuesday at Target.
The parking lot was maybe a third full. Late afternoon. That dead hour between lunch and dinner when the only people shopping are retirees and parents who ran out of something specific. In this case, a guy in his mid-thirties with a kid. The kid was maybe seven. Hard to tell exactly. Old enough to carry his own bag, young enough to still be holding his dad's hand when they walked out.
They stopped about forty feet from a white Model Y. The dad let go of the kid's hand and pulled out his phone. Tapped something. And then just stood there, holding two Target bags, looking at the car like he was waiting for a bus.
The car started moving.
Slowly. Very slowly, actually, which somehow made it weirder. If it had raced over it would have felt like a stunt. But it crept forward at maybe two miles an hour, like a dog that heard a can opener three rooms away. No driver. No one inside. Just a white car, rolling through a parking lot, navigating around a shopping cart return and a badly parked Kia, heading toward these two people like it knew them.
The kid's face went through about six things in two seconds. I was loading groceries into my trunk one row over and I watched the whole thing happen in real time.
First his eyes got wide. Then his mouth opened. Then he looked up at his dad. Then back at the car. Then he took one step backward, instinctively, the way you would if a large animal started walking toward you. Then he laughed. Not a polite laugh. A full-body laugh. The kind of laugh where your knees buckle a little.
"IT'S COMING," he said. Loud. Several people turned around.
His dad was trying so hard to be casual about it. Leaning on one leg, phone in his pocket already, like this was just how cars worked and always had. But you could see the corner of his mouth. He was grinning. He'd probably done this fifty times and it still got him.
A woman pushing a cart stopped walking. Just stopped, mid-stride, cart still rolling forward a few inches without her. She watched the car glide past her and you could see her brain trying to file this under something normal and failing. An older couple near the handicap spots both turned and stared. The man said something to his wife. She shook her head.
The car stopped right in front of them. Perfectly. Like a valet had pulled it up except the valet was software.
The kid walked up to it and put both hands flat on the hood. Just stood there with his palms on the car like he was checking to make sure it was real. Then he looked up at his dad and said - and I'm quoting exactly because I wrote it down in my phone immediately after - "Can it do that again?"
That's the moment I keep thinking about.
Not the summon itself. The summon is a party trick at this point, honestly. It works about 80% of the time and the other 20% it gets confused by a speed bump or stops for no reason and you have to go get it yourself like a dog that gave up on fetch. Tesla owners know this. It's impressive and janky in almost equal measure.
But that kid. That kid just watched a car drive itself to him across a parking lot and his first thought was not "wow" or "that's scary" or "how does that work." His first thought was "again." Like it was a ride. Like it was obviously how things should work and the only question was how often you could make it happen.
He's going to be sixteen in nine years. He's going to walk into a car dealership or pull up a website or do whatever people do in 2035 to get a car, and somewhere in his brain there's going to be a memory of a Tuesday at Target when a car came to him. That's his baseline. That's his normal.
Every car he ever considers will be measured against this. Not consciously. He won't sit there thinking about it. But when someone shows him a car that can't do anything on its own, that just sits where you parked it and waits, some part of him is going to feel like something's missing. The way we'd feel if someone handed us a phone that couldn't take pictures. You'd use it, sure. But you'd feel the gap.
His dad didn't ruin normal cars for him on purpose. He just let him see what was possible on a random Tuesday, and the kid's brain did what kids' brains do. It recalibrated. Quietly. Permanently.
This is how industries actually change, by the way. Not in boardrooms or press conferences. In parking lots, in front of seven-year-olds, on days nobody is paying attention. One kid at a time learns that cars can come when you call them, and that kid grows up and tells every other kid, and suddenly the baseline shifts and nobody remembers it being any other way.
The woman with the cart eventually started walking again. She looked back once more at the Model Y and then at her own car, a Chevy something-or-other two rows over. She didn't make a face exactly. It was more like a thought crossed behind her eyes that she wasn't ready to have yet. Then she kept walking.
The dad buckled the kid into the back seat. They drove off. It was maybe a three-minute event. Nobody clapped. Nobody filmed it. The parking lot went back to being a parking lot.
But that kid saw it. And he's going to remember it.
That's the part the sales projections don't capture. Somewhere out there, right now, there are a few million kids who have seen something they can't unsee. A car that moves on its own. A screen where a dashboard used to be. A thing their parents did with their phone that made a two-ton machine come to heel.
These kids are not going to read comparison reviews. They're not going to care about quarterly earnings or panel gaps or whatever the current complaint is. They're going to walk up to the first car they ever buy and put their hands on the hood and ask it to do something. And if it can't, they'll find one that will.
That's what a Tuesday at Target did.