10,000 Line Up Daily For Quatchis & Friends

Vendors pose with 2010 Games mascots (left to right) Miga, Sumi, Mukmuk and Quatchi in a shop selling Olympic merchandise in Whistler. Photograph by Michael Kappeler, Vancouver Sun.

For those that didn’t believe me when I said there was going to be a buying frenzy during the limited time existence of Quatchis, read the following:

There is, hanging from my purse, a small fuzzy thing. If you are at all tuned into the 2010 Olympics, you’d recognize it as a pocket-sized Quatchi.

Not everyone understands, of course. A colleague of mine, a classy woman who is much younger than I and thus should be minding her manners, saw it the other day and said: “Shelley, you are a grown woman. Why is there a toy dangling off you?”

Which leads me to the 2010 Olympic Superstore, where hundreds of locals and tourists have been lining up every morning, well before the store opens, so many there is a stanchion to keep them at bay and a burly guy guarding the door, in case those seniors from Seattle decide to rush the place.

The line grows as the day goes on — an estimated 10,000 daily, by some accounts — and if you think these shoppers aren’t packing enough cash or Visa limit, ’cause that’s all they take at this store, then you haven’t been in the middle of the feeding frenzy when a pallet of those mittens comes rolling down the aisle.

Truth is, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone in this town right now who isn’t sporting or carrying something 2010-related, something emblazoned with five rings, something red.

Caps, scarves, hoodies, toques, T-shirts, bags and pins, the Olympic tchotchke list goes on and on, much like the superstore itself, which consumes fully h alf of the main floor of the big Bay store downtown and which, on any given day over the next two weeks will be, as they say, a zoo.

What, exactly, is this compulsion that sees us desperately seeking a $20 plaid scarf, that had 60,000 people hugging their souvenir cardboard drum cases, containing a plastic cloak, a flashlight, a drumstick, a candle torch and a flag, as they streamed out of the opening ceremony Friday night?

Why do we line up, as if our life depended on it, to buy stuff with logos?

For the rest of the article, see here.

The International Cryptozoology Museum appears to have the last population of little Quatchis for sale on the East Coast.

International Cryptozoology Museum
661 Congress St.
Portland, ME 04101
Wed-Sat, 11-6, Sunday, Noon-5.
207-518-9496

Loren Coleman About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct). Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015. Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.

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