The Tourist Junk Market (down at the boardwalk)
There is a bizarre phenomenon that causes a person’s consumptive discretion to decrease in direct proportion to the distance he is from his home. It’s a condition that afflicts all travelers, from young Euro hipsters to fanny-pack-wearing-red-staters.
We’ve all been guilty of haggling some poor third worlder out of an extra dollar or two, only to walk away with a tacky necklace that will be instantly forgotten and spend the rest of its life in the bottom of a knick knack drawer.
Whether you’re walking through a Tijuana marketplace, or cruising the Venice Beach boardwalk, you see the same junk market spring up wherever the hoards of tourists are.
Take the t-shirt stands. It’s like they went slogan hunting in the Appalachians armed with a bottle of Wild Turkey and a digital voice recorder.
“Here have a few drinks, kind sir. Now tell me about your attitude towards women, and how you might express that in a crude statement, five words or less.”
But walk down the Venice boardwalk and you’ll see these stalls everywhere and they’re almost always empty. Is there a group of people who keep coming back to get their henna tats redone? Or is it a craze that has run its course, doomed to disappear when the last hippie checks out? Will their stalls be taken over by people writing on rice, or something even more useless? Even a seasoned economist would have trouble predicting the direction of the tourist junk market.
I envision a future in which tourists no longer feel the need to purchase something…anything…to feel that their trip is complete. Or, at the very least, the offerings available to the traveler are environmentally responsible products, not landfill-bound junk. Perhaps commemorative carbon credits, or reusable shopping bags. At least then we'd be killing two birds with one stone.
We’ve all been guilty of haggling some poor third worlder out of an extra dollar or two, only to walk away with a tacky necklace that will be instantly forgotten and spend the rest of its life in the bottom of a knick knack drawer.
Whether you’re walking through a Tijuana marketplace, or cruising the Venice Beach boardwalk, you see the same junk market spring up wherever the hoards of tourists are.
Take the t-shirt stands. It’s like they went slogan hunting in the Appalachians armed with a bottle of Wild Turkey and a digital voice recorder.
“Here have a few drinks, kind sir. Now tell me about your attitude towards women, and how you might express that in a crude statement, five words or less.”
What a fantastic way to commemorate your trip to Los Angeles — T-shirt designed by drunken redneck. There aren’t enough hipsters in LA and New York to absorb all the irony in those shirts.
Or how about the Your Name on a Grain of Rice craze?
Click here for the "Definitive Guide to Buying Name-on-Rice Jewelry" (you won't be sorry)
Who cares if the target market is kids? It’s still lame. When I was ten I wanted a Rickey Henderson card not the smallest grain-based reproduction of my name humanly possible.
Has this become a skill, handed down from generation to generation? How does the rice-writer make enough money to buy his own rice for dinner? Does she survive by eating the un-inked rice at the end of the day? Just another mystery of the tourist junk market.
Has this become a skill, handed down from generation to generation? How does the rice-writer make enough money to buy his own rice for dinner? Does she survive by eating the un-inked rice at the end of the day? Just another mystery of the tourist junk market.
Another, apparently popular, Venice Beach travel purchase is a henna tattoo. I suppose this fills the same niche as getting your hair braided in the Caribbean; a harmless, mildly-titillating form of body transformation.
But walk down the Venice boardwalk and you’ll see these stalls everywhere and they’re almost always empty. Is there a group of people who keep coming back to get their henna tats redone? Or is it a craze that has run its course, doomed to disappear when the last hippie checks out? Will their stalls be taken over by people writing on rice, or something even more useless? Even a seasoned economist would have trouble predicting the direction of the tourist junk market.
I envision a future in which tourists no longer feel the need to purchase something…anything…to feel that their trip is complete. Or, at the very least, the offerings available to the traveler are environmentally responsible products, not landfill-bound junk. Perhaps commemorative carbon credits, or reusable shopping bags. At least then we'd be killing two birds with one stone.
posted by J. Bovenizer | 11:31 PM
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