the not-so-subtle art of the gift shop
maybe it's just capitalism brainrot, but i love souvenirs
Technically, the first day of summer is June 21st. But we’ve already had two heatwaves in Philadelphia, my neighbors are setting off fireworks every night, and I can hear the mister softee jingle as the truck circles the park near my house. It’s summer. And since summer here means humidity and misery, at least as far as the weather is concerned, I’m thinking fondly (longingly!) of seaside towns.
I’m not a religious person, but the ocean fills me with an acute, crushing fear of god. Maybe this is because as a child I mostly saw it from the coast of Maine, crashing over jagged rock formations rather than lapping gently onto a sandy beach. Maybe it’s because one time I went swimming in Delaware, got caught in the undertow, and briefly choked on saltwater. Maybe it’s just that the vastness of it is overwhelming, and anything that enormous and powerful demands respect. The point being that when I go to the beach, I will admire the ocean, I will go for a walk barefoot along its edge, but I will no longer swim in it. Instead, I prefer safe activities. Most of all, I like to gift shop.
And I love a good gift shop anywhere – a national park, an art museum, an airport. I even love the spinning racks of keychains and baseball hats at the back of a 7-Eleven. But gift shops have been perfected on the eastern seaboard, in the small coastal town. The genius of these tiny commercial districts – whether they’re boardwalks on the Jersey Shore or Main Streets in a New England fishing village – is that they have somewhere between five and fifteen shops, all within three blocks of each other, all selling the exact same stuff.
There are small variations from shop to shop – one will carry fudge instead of salt water taffy; one will have the name “Alicia” on the custom nameplate keychains and one will have “Alice”; one will have the silly lobster graphics on a shirt and a second will have them on a magnet, while a third shop will have both. It’s fun to visit each one, catalogue their differences, and try to guess their best sellers.
I’ve been visiting the same part of Maine most summers for the better part of two decades, and the inventory of the gift shops there has never changed. They have carried cartoon lobster “say no to pot” shirts since before I was born, and I can only assume they will continue selling cartoon lobster “say no to pot” shirts long after I die. And every year I go into every single shop, in every single town, to look at the identical merchandise, and I never get bored.
And as much as I love the humble souvenir, I usually don’t even buy anything at these shops. I’ll usually get some fudge and/or candy towards the end of a trip. I have three pairs of socks that I bought on the boardwalk in Atlantic City in a futile attempt to prevent birkenstock blisters. And I have a couple postcards I never sent, from Pemaquid Point, ME; from Boone, NC; from Reading Terminal Market in Philly where I used to work. (A huge perk of that job for me was unlimited access to the tourist traps, which I would walk through on my breaks. More than anywhere else, I love souvenirs for the place I live. To this day, I can’t catch the Amtrak from 30th Street Station without loitering in the Faber, Coe & Gregg. They’ve got miniature liberty bells and replica Declarations of Independence – it’s as good as a museum exhibit to me.) But, generally speaking, I browse, admire, and walk away empty handed.
I think I’m resistant to spending money on the very thing that draws me to gift shops in the first place – they serve a completely different function than any other store. Their inventory has no pretensions of functionality, or coolness, or quality. Unlike most stores, which are pitching you items for future use, a souvenir shop is offering up tokens of nostalgia. Customers are looking for the small material good that best represents where they are right now, in order to look back on it later. Souvenirs are not meant to be beautiful, they are meant to easily and quickly represent the core aesthetic values of places we’ve visited, as viewed by an outsider. A tourist equates Maine with lobsters, so they buy a t-shirt with a lobster on it. Another tourist equates the beach with buoys, so they buy a buoy keychain. Another buys a postcard with a picture of a place they went to and that place’s name in big text. It’s a piece of proof, something physical to point at and say “look, I was there!”
Souvenirs attempt to take what’s distinctive about a place and boil it down into the most simple possible version of itself. There’s an inherent tackiness, a falseness of it all that’s looked down on by the locals, but that’s part of what makes it fun. It’s purely surface level, objectively uncool. We want reminders of places we’ve visited, places where we were outsiders, unbeholden to our regular obligations. A tourist has no job to do, no image to uphold. There are very few situations in life where our only goal is fun; vacation is precious because it is a rarity.
So we want to capture some aspect of the freedom and joy we feel while away, and bottle it up to take back with us. We want to look at our souvenirs later and remember that we aren’t actually stuck in the unchanging minutiae of our daily lives – sometimes we get away. Sometimes we sit on the boardwalk with an ice cream cone and watch the waves crash against the shore. Sometimes we get to be tourists, exploring a place where no one knows us, where no one really cares if we’re cool or interesting.
If nothing else, souvenirs are a good reminder that when we’re uncool, we’re free to finally chill the fuck out. To stop pretending, stop posturing, stop trying to impress other people. Just put on your lobster t-shirt and take a selfie on the boardwalk. It’s fun to be tacky. In fact, it’s the best part of summer.
xoxo
Franny 💋🏝