A Target run with a duck in red booties

He treats her like his own kid on a trip to the store. The tour starts in the book aisle, where one boy is so lost in his reading that the cart rolls right past him and he never looks up.

"Do you want to feel some animals?" he asks, and they go through kids' books with a kitty, a patch of grass that he points out isn't real grass, and a monkey. One of the books has a duckling in it.

Most shoppers do notice her, and then they look twice. Someone asks, over and over, "Can he hold him?"

Wrinkle has a routine for meeting fans. "She usually does a nice fist bump, and then she gets kisses," her dad explains. He introduces her as a professional duck, and when people talk to her in a sweet voice, her tail feathers wag.

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Then come the toys. She takes a rubber duck right out of his hand with her beak and drops it into the cart herself. He holds up a toy snake and admits he doesn't know why she would like that one. A ball goes over better, and she pokes it around the aisle.

Kisses go both ways. He plants one on her bill, and she gives a fan a little kiss of her own. "She doesn't have any teeth," he says. "She doesn't have any lips either." She turns two in a couple of days, he tells them, and then he remembers the warning he forgot to give. She likes toes.

Next he offers her a soft yellow Pikachu, and Wrinkle lunges. "That's an imposter," he decides. "That's no duckling." He has a second theory too: she needs to be the only soft and cute thing around. "You don't like competition," he tells her.

People keep stopping, and he calls the whole thing a reverse petting zoo, because she'll pet you back. "I thought it was fake for a second," one shopper admits. At one point he tries to find her a puzzle. "You don't have hands," he says. "I keep forgetting. I'm so sorry."

He had told her she could have anything in the store. At the register, someone asks if this is her selection. It is. That's what she would like, and that is what she chose.