…where only 2/3 of the stuff is “sex stuff.” It’s hardly news that “sexy _____” has taken over the halloween racks, well down into inappropriate sizes.
Today’s Spencers is sex & drugs. And maybe a little rock and roll. But definitely sex & drugs.
There’s one in the Georgian Mall in Barrie.
Hot Topic in the Eaton Centre is similar, minus all the sexystuff.
I was assistant manager of one in the last 70s. I remember a lot of the items – lamps, black lights, jewelry, sunglasses, bath, gags, and, of course, the sex toys. I do have a few stories.
[ul]
[li]The woman who wanted to return a vibrator. We were supposed to ask a reason, and she said, it didn’t work. After we took it back. I turned it on and it certainly operated fine.[/li]
[li]The time a bunch of kids were trying to shoplift sunglasses and turned around to see me standing right behind them. The skulked out of the store.[/li]
[li]Christmas Eve – the customer who came in five minutes before closing and spent an hour with his Christmas shopping. :rolleyes: We couldn’t ask him to leave – against company policy.[/li]
[li]On our busiest day (the Saturday before Christmas) someone showed up and bought a bunch of items and tried to pay by check. His place of employment was closed. The bank was closed. Luckily, I knew someone who worked at the bank branch and called; she had never heard of him. I had a bad feeling, but nothing concrete, so just for the heck of it, I called his home number. A woman answered and said he only looked at the apartment, and didn’t move in. I said I couldn’t take his check. He nodded, quietly tore it up, and left. A week or so later, my contact at the bank said he’d been passing bad checks all over the area (including another Spencer Gifts) that day. I may have been the only one who caught on to it.[/li]
[li]The time my manager was away for training and the other assistant manager came down with measles. I would have had to spend four days there from 9:00 pm to 9:30 pm, but they eventually sent someone to spell me.[/li]
[li]The little labels. Spencer uses computerized stocking before there were PCs. Everything you bought had a little cardboard sales ticket with a bar code (before the UPD was fully established). We’d tear off the ticket and put it on a spindle (they had a hole for this). If something didn’t have the ticket (some items, like jewelry, were too small), you’d write down the five-digit code. At closing, you’d use a pipe cleaner to keep the tickets together, and along with the written sheets, send it to Atlantic City.[/li]
[li]Tickets ending in “7” were clearance. Their tickets didn’t differentiate, so any 97-cent item would have a code of 00097.[/li]
[li]Inventory day was always Super Bowl Sunday. By the time we got out, the game was just about over. I stopped watching the Super Bowl at that point and still don’t watch it.[/li]
[li]Each “department” in the store had a three-letter code. “GAG” were gag gifts. “BTH” were bath.[/li]
[li]Our store had a live goldfish in a bowl on display. Despite the fact no one ever fed him, or cleaned the water, or did anything, it lived well over a year.[/li]
[li]Once someone bought a $200 fiberoptic lamp – our most expensive item. The next day, he wanted to return it. The manager went crazy trying to convince him to keep it, since the return would look bad.[/li]
[li]While I was working there, my old boss came in with his kid. Now, my old boss had always been a cheapskate (he later went to jail for fraud). His son wanted a $16 fiberoptic lamp. My boss steered him toward a $7 plastic rainbow lamp. From the look on the son’s face, this happened all the time.[/li][/ul]
I go into the local Spencer Gifts from time to time, but they are far more tacky than they were in the 70s.
Wow–I’d forgotteon about Spencer gifts. I haven’t been in one for 4 decades. But when I was 13, they were cool!
Especially the black light posters.
But I have a question about the sexual items:
Some of the naughty stuff was…well, intriguing. Yes, back then (late 1970’s), the naughty stuff was very mundane by today’s standards. But the shop mostly appealed to kids…Was there any kind of official policy, or even legal regulation, about selling certain items to minors?
Nobody remember those plasma globes? Prominently featured in the 80’s classic “My Science Project”?
One of the biggest urban legends in my day (Also the 80’s) was, if you knew the secret password, you could buy some killer weed that they kept in the back away from public access. LOL.
Were the Spencer Catalogs from the same company? I ordered my Christmas presents from that little catalog every year from age 10 to 15. I bought an uncle a little electric defroster for his refrigerator. All kinds of little inexpensive gifts for relatives.
There weren’t any sex toys. Or anything naughty that I recall. Here’s a sample of a classic catalog. A return address stamp. Tie rack. The earthworm catcher. All kinds of cute novelties that made good gifts. At least I thought they were cool gifts when I was 12. 
I loved this catalog and would spend hours just flipping through the pages and deciding what I’d buy for gifts.
Me and a friend used to shoplift like crazy from the Spencer’s in the Phoenix AZ mall in the 80’s. Ahh, teenage larceny.
Ahhh…Spencer’s…
Kept me from dying of boredom while Mom looked at clothes in Monkey Wards.
And Hickory Farms kept me from dying of starvation.
All this. The sex toys were limited to the coyly presented “personal vibrator” in the earlier days, with the same very-slightly-MILFy woman massaging her cheek with it.
But you could browse those strange listings for hours. Wall things with Irish sayings. Kitchen gadgets. Furniture sliders. T-shirts with goofy sayings. Aprons of the “Kiss the Cook” variety.
Lava lamps, lightning globes and the more overt sex toys were from much later, maybe the 1990s.
There was (is?) a Canadian version of Spencer’s, called San Francisco Gifts. I don’t know if the two companies are related, but the product line is exactly the same. Google is no help - there’s almost no way that I know of to filter out all of the San Francisco city search results.
I remember perusing San Francisco in the 80’s and 90’s in Londonderry mall in Edmonton. Formative experiences!
I’m absolutely convinced that Spencer’s Gifts is a CIA front. There’s no other way that so many of them can not only remain open but in the same location where they’ve been since the '70s even as malls die around them and nobody seems to be buying any Jar-Jar Binks masks, black lights, or fake dog poop there. I think that in the backroom they’re either debriefing an ISIS member or guarding a top secret teleportation device to other Spencer’s Gifts/CIA storefronts.
And Vietnamese nail salons and Chinese restaurants are a front for the Triad. There’s never enough customers to make them economically viable (especially the salons, with one every two blocks), but they persist and persist.
But hey, that means some CIA spook has to do the books on fake dog poop sales. So there’s justice.
Comedian Gary Gulman on Spencer Gifts
The bit is more refined in his special “In This Economy”, but this is link is easier.
Gad… I worked there during Christmas season many years ago.
Corporate used to this thing called “salt and pull”. The store would receive a shipment of merchandise and it was the job of the receivers ( a team of two or more) to conduct an inventory of that shipment against the packing list. Sometimes your shipment contained too many items (salt) or too few (pull), and that any discrepancy must be reported. I was told that the idea was to discourage potential employee theft.
The manager explained to me that EVERY employee was a potential thief and, not only was I to look out for theft by the customers, but keep a sharp eye on my co-workers.
Didn’t really instill a “team-member” mentality.
I don’t recall there were any restrictions. The vibrators were marketed as personal relaxation devices; kids had no idea what they were (they were not designed to look realistic). Most of the other things – edible panties, and some of the gag gifts – were coy in their description and I doubt a kid would know what they could be used for.
In any case, the teens who saw these things rarely bought them – they either picked them up to giggle at or shoplifted them.
Ninja’d
But we still have Spencer’s Gifts - there is one in West Ed
Wouldn’t be the first time: the CIA has used very realistic looking fake dog poop for drops, homing beacons, and for transmitters. (Can’t cite because I’m mobile, but easily googled.)
Hadn’t been in a Spencer Gifts for a good 20 years though there’s one not too far away.
I seem to remember that Spencer Gifts and The Sharper Image had a lot more overlap, but it looks like my memory is wrong.
Sheesh, all these posts and no one has mentioned the absolute staple of Spencers (in my mind anyway, aside from MAYBE sexy greeting cards), that weird thing with all the pins that you would put your hand on and it would show the print of your hand. Gross, i just realized that as a kid i probably put that thing on my face… blech…