‘Hottest Target employee ever’ wins fans and makes workers happy with his dance moves

All he did was dance. After hours. At the Target where he works in suburban Des Moines, Iowa.

But there must have been something about the way Chase Carlson moved his 260 pounds of gym-certified muscles that made people want to watch him dance to the hip-hop song “Juju On That Beat.”

They can’t stop watching.

He posted a video of his impromptu dance to his Facebook page on Nov. 8.

But a couple of weeks ago a friend of his sister’s — former Miss Iowa and “Amazing Race” contestant Jess VerSteeg — shared it with her multitude of followers, and bam!

The dancing Target guy is a viral star.

His video has been watched more than 3 million times and shared nearly 24,000 times.

“It was kind of crazy,” said Carlson, 24. “It kept spiraling and spiraling.”

A typical comment on the video: “Two favorite things. Target and big good lookin guys who can dance.”

Another person crowned him the “hottest Target employee ever.”

Now whenever he steps in to help at the checkout lanes, people stand in his line — even when others are open — so they can check him out, er, take a picture of him.

The attention makes him blush redder than his Target shirt.

He’s been at that Super Target in Urbandale for nearly two years. He’s the executive team leader for asset protection.

Loss prevention is his job. Making work a happy place for his co-workers is his goal, a leader’s instinct nurtured when he served as student body president at Grand View University, where he graduated in 2015.

“I try to make this place as fun as possible,” he said. “So I goof off and make them laugh.”

He made the video that went viral, which he captioned “the things I do at work to make it fun for the team,” during the busy holiday season, when laughs are hard to come by for stressed-out employees.

“It’s kind of our crunch time and can be sort of stressful, and we’re sacrificing a lot as far as being at the store and being away from our families so people can come and shop,” he said.

He credits his “Aunt Jody” for his smooth moves. They played a lot of “Just Dance” on the Xbox when she baby-sat him.

He’s made other videos at work — faux store announcements, for instance, embellished with Snapchat filters — and posted them on his social media accounts, which he guards carefully now that fame has found him.

(Disclaimer: No work hours are wasted in the making of this fun, which usually happens before or after hours, he said.)

He had to change the settings on his Facebook page because “every day I would wake up to over 1,000 friend requests,” he said. “Maybe later I’ll turn it back on.”

He said his boss thinks all this attention “is hilarious. He said he’s very, very proud of me ...

“He says if it’s what engages the team and makes them laugh and they like coming to work, then keep going for it.”

The pressure is on, though, to keep the hits coming.

How’s he going to top “Juju On That Beat”?

“That’s the thing I’m most anxious about, now that it’s gotten as much attention as it has,” he said.

“People are going to be actively monitoring my social media. I feel like we have to keep one-upping what we did.”

This story was originally published February 1, 2017 at 4:01 PM with the headline "‘Hottest Target employee ever’ wins fans and makes workers happy with his dance moves."