Going to a Kwik-E-Mart
My friend Jared and I went to a Kwik-E-Mart earlier today. To spare you any possible coolness anticipation, let me just spoil the ending of this story right now: it was terribly underwhelming.
7-Eleven has teamed up with the makers of the Simpsons to do a promotion for the new Simpsons movie coming out later in July. As part of the promotion, eleven 7-Elevens in the United States (and one in Canada) have been converted to Kwik-E-Marts. Looking through the list of locations of converted Kwik-E-Marts, I saw that the 7-Eleven in Bladensburg had been converted. What a lucky break! Only eleven Kwik-E-Marts in the entire world (and only lasting one month at that), and one was within fifteen minutes driving distance? I knew I had to go. The next closest Kwik-E-Mart is literally in New York. We got one for the entire mid-Atlantic seaboard.
I wanted to see the look of surprise on Jared’s face when we pulled up to a real life Kwik-E-Mart, so I got him to come along, but I didn’t tell him where we were going. I left it as a surprise. This proved to be a mistake. By the time we got there if it was anything less than the world’s largest ball of prostitutes he was going to be disappointed.
The Kwik-E-Mart was actually moderately well-attended. The parking lot was pretty full and lots of people were milling around outside, marveling at the spectacle. The entire outside of the store was re-skinned; it did look quite different. But it wasn’t really worth the drive just to see that in person, and the inside was very underwhelming. The store was just reskinned, and in a very poor manner at that. The Slurpee machine face plate was replaced to say Slushee; big deal. Some plastic decals with Apu on them saying things like “3 for the price of 3″ and “If your food is not fresh your money will be begrudgingly refunded” were plastered around on various display cases. An old man in the freezer decal was in front of the ice. And human-size plastic stand-ins of the Simpsons family were placed in the store.
The most impressive thing about the promotion was that all of the employees were wearing Kwik-E-Mart uniforms. That was the largest expenditure. Everything else – the stand-ins, decals, and replacement sign to go out front, looks like they all came in a kit that can’t have cost more than a thousand dollars. What a disappointment. I was expecting Simpsons-themed merchandise, like in the photographs of one of the Kwik-E-Marts I saw, but the promotion here was just a re-skin of the store. You couldn’t actually buy anything out of the Simpsons, such as Buzz Cola. The Slurpee machine said Slushee but it still sold just Slurpees in Slurpee-brand cups. D’oh!
I kind of felt sorry for the people milling around outside and inside the store, taking pictures of themselves and friends in front of the various lame stand-ins. Some of them had driven from a considerable ways away. What a disappointment! At least Jared and I hadn’t come too far. And hey, it wasn’t all bad. A woman at the counter was giving away free cookies to every customer, almost as if to acknowledge how bad the promotion sucked, and that a cookie would be consolation. A bored rent-a-cop sat in a chair in the corner, on-duty for the length of the promotion guarding against people trying to run off with the character stand-ins, I suppose. He certainly wasn’t necessary for crowd control.
So that was it. The actual idea of turning a 7-Eleven into a Kwik-E-Mart is really cool, but this was a half-assed implementation. Really, all they did was put signs up around the store, re-skin the outside, and give the employees new uniforms. The store wasn’t really transformed into a real Kwik-E-Mart; why would a real Kwik-E-Mart have stand-ins for a few random residents (the Simpsons) of the town? No, it didn’t come off as awesome. All it came off as was a movie promotion, as that’s exactly all it was.
Copyright (c) 2007 Cyde Weys. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled “GNU Free Documentation License”. Image of the Kwik-E-Mart in Chicago is (c) 2007 SchmuckyTheCat and released under the GFDL.
July 5th, 2007 at 12:43
Meh, the Canadian one was fairly well done – we had proper cups at least.
July 5th, 2007 at 13:31
That’s what I heard from a guy at the Chicago Kwik-E-Mart as well. Is the one around here really just that bad, or maybe it hasn’t received its full complement of supplies yet?