It was like déjà vu all over again. I’m standing in a souvenir store on Fremont Street in downtown Las Vegas, encircled by a myriad of merchandise plastered with Las Vegas, casino names and other Southwest themes. As I gaze at what is before me, my eyes go in and out of focus in a TV show time-travely way. I say to myself, “self, I have been in this store before, exposed to the same stuff, just in another city… heck country.” Then I catch myself saying out loud, “I just don’t want any of this crap!”

At the end of the day all of this is stuff I don’t need in my life. I’d rather just spend my hard-earned money on something more meaningful in experiences. Needless to say I left the store empty-handed but full of confidence in my decision. The rest of the family, well, they picked up cheap t-shirts off the $5 rack which was ok with me, knowing the bulk of our money will be much better spent.

Anatomy of Souvenir Hell

There’s a myriad of definitions out there for the word “souvenir” and I’ll offer this one from Wikipedia that reads, “from French, a remembrance or memory, memento, keepsake, or token of remembrance, is an object a person acquires for the memories the owner associates with it.” With that… why tokenize the memory and just live the experience?

Souvenirs are nothing new; I remember them back in the day when we would stop on family trips throughout New England as a child. As we lived in said New England, despite our pleas acquiring such souvenirs was rarely if ever an option. Maple sugar candy, however, was usually allowed after some persistence, and this sweet treat is a memory – dare I say experience – that remains with me to this day.

Along the way souvenirs became Big Souvenirs with the onslaught of mega souvenir retailers, box-store size locations where upon entry you are overwhelmed at eye-level with racks of apparel, shelves of items and the high walls are plastered with said apparel and beach towels and other larger items. With all this sensory overload who wouldn’t want to acquire that sweatshirt from Myrtle Beach or those Christmas tree ornaments from Universal Studios?

Being In The Moment

Instead of these acquisitions I have opted to pay a little extra for a more enhanced experience. On that journey through Sin City this included better seats for Cirque du Soleil “O” (I still want to know how that pool works!) and upgrading our tour of the Hoover Dam to a pimped-out pink jeep rather than a staid motorcoach. We had a wicked better time as a result, plus a lot of great pictures and memories.

Regarding those pictures – and video – we have literally gigs of them backed-up, just waiting to be viewed again. For this member of Generation X, taking pictures in my youth was limited to the 27 exposures on the roll of still film, and as we didn’t have a Super 8 camera video memories simply don’t exist. With all of the pictures we take today, often they are just accumulated on various hard drives and online storage, but at least things can be done with them, like collage prints, captioning videos, photobooks (something I want to do) and merely talking about them.

Despite my expressed disdain, I have wandered off to the far corners of these shops and have succumbed to the purchase or two of discounted items. The Disney t-shirt I bought in December of 2019 that had that year accompanying the mouse’s shadow discounted to $9.99 was a decent find. Another purchase that serves a more functional role is “used” decks of cards from casinos, which you can get for around $5 each. Clearly a deck of cards is not used much as the cards are relatively pristine with the exception of the notches cut on 2 opposite corners so they never get used again on a gambling table. As we are a card-playing family (some more so than others) they serve a functional role, from an efficient time-killer to replacing cards that are destined to be lost.

As I finish this post, I scan my surroundings at the Starbucks serving as my writing studio and quickly see souvenir drinkware, from mugs emblazoned with stereotypical Dairyland iconography to the giant W representing the state’s major university’s sports teams. All of this reminds me of a quote from the comedy genius of Mel Brooks, and to paraphrase it, “merchandising, where the real money is made!”. Where that may be the case, the lure of souvenirs will remain for me something to actively manage throughout my own and my family’s journeys.

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This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

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