I'm obsessed with museums. I've been visiting them since I was a kid, I volunteered at a museum in Ashland, Kentucky the entirety of high school and I've been working in them ever since. I love everything about museums and College Humor takes a hilarious look at museum stores in "Gift Shop." It's probably the most accurate representation of what it's like to shop in a museum gift shop.
For people who love collecting stuff, museum stores are the best. You can get everything you never thought you needed. Gift shops were hard for me because growing up in the 1990s, no one ever had Natasha on any items. You can find it now, but when I was a kid, it was hard to get personalized souvenirs. Want some bouncy balls? Done. Frog bucket hats? You got it. T-shirts about Civil War battles in Eastern Kentucky? I've got one from my local museum.
When you're a kid and you visit any place with a gift shop, it's a show of status to be able to buy all the things. Even when I was working in the after school program, I saw kids leaving with bags of stuff that they'd play with for like a day and break or just leave in the bag and never play with again.
I've helped come up with new strategies for gift shops before. How to arrange certain items to make them more appealing, what could be sold that would be purchased more than just history books. As a history graduate and young museum professional, I love this video. Museum gift shops are awesome and while this video is definitely a parody, I think it really does shine a positive light on museum stores.
Keep on buying kitschy stuff, people! Museum professionals will thank you for it!
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