And lightning globes. And greeting cards of morbidly obese women in bikinis.
(I’m so old I can remember when Johnny Carson introduced both those things on his show and was entranced with them.)
Pin Art. It is still around.
My kids convinced me to check out Five Below. I wanted everything they had! I bought a Seinfeld fridge magnet that reads, “She had man hands”.
the one in my mall also carried a good selection of band shirts as well.
I wonder what percentage of the iconic Farrah posters were purchased from Spencer’s?
One recently opened not far from where I live. It’s in a strip mall, not a regular mall. They now compete with the best of your local sex shops for toys and gadgets, movies too. And with pot being legal in this state, a wide variety of smoking items.
Spencer’s in Tyson’s Corner always had one of those boats shaped like a '59 Cadillac high up on a shelf.
From the official site:
That’s funny because the pin art thing was the first thing to come to mind when bordelond mentioned The Sharper Image.
I bought my second favorite possession at Spencer’s: A candle holder in the shape of a ram’s skull (with horns). The eye sockets have clear marbles in them, so when you light a candle (votive size), put it in the little glass vase (so you don’t get wax all over) and slip it in the back of the “skull,” the eyes glow! The longer it sits on the shelf, the dirtier it gets and the better it looks.
Yep, the display model probably cycled through face, middle finger, genitals all day long.
Huh. I just Googled “Spencer’s Gifts”, and Google immediately showed me that there’s one in the mall across the river. I had no idea. I also can’t remember the last time I went to that mall.
There was a Spencer’s at the big mall near where I grew up in the early '80s, but I was never allowed to go in.
I used quotes and included the keyword canada:
“san francisco gifts” canada
Me too. Black glitter nail polish, no less.
I’ve mentioned this before, but my memories of Spencers goes back much further.
I first encountered Spencers in the late 1960s/early 1970s. There was one at Menlo Park Mall in New Jersey, and it looked nothing like Spencers today. The store then was a normal brightly-lit store with its novelties in segmented bins, each with a catalog drawing and description. It was still as tacky and tasteless as it currently is, with the fake dog poo and the risque gifts, but without the darkened, blacklit interiors. And with a lot less clothing.
The thing is, we used to get a mail-order catalog even earlier, in the mid-1960s, from a store in Washington DC called The Game Room. It had exactly the same stuff that was in Spencers, to the point that all the drawings and descriptions in the bins posted at Spencers were absolutely identical to the ones in the Game Room catalog. There is clearly a connection there, but I’m not sure what it is. According to Wikipedia, Spencers started as a mail-order business in 1947, and opened its first store in Cherry Hill, NJ in 1963 (and the store’s still open). I don’t know if The Game Room was an early tryout for a retail location in DC, or if it was a company that got its stuff from Spencers, or if it was another incarnation of the Spencers mail-order business that operated out of DC. But they were clearly getting their stuff from the same place.
Over the years I’d search and find occasional old references to the old Game Room in DC, but there’s nothing now. And Spencers has apparently closed the stores it used to have in DC.
I may be able to raise this to a new level. More than 5-6 years ago, I walked into our local mall’s Spencer’s (still there) and was confronted with a large vertical and rotating glass case that held what looked like high-end genitalia piercers and “enhancers”, for male or female genitals. Tongue jewelry that was designed to be used as a tickler. I mean, enamel and silver and bright colors. I was like, whoa. Has anyone else run into this kind of front showcase display?
They used to have these tacky “Free Sex” coupon business cards that you could buy. I remember being in 7th grade and buying one small pack of 10 cards. I think that they, my library card, and what money I had earned were all that was ever in that wallet.
No, never gave a single one away. 
After several years, when the wallet had been worn to shreds and when I had just gotten my license, I looked and found that those cards had all been pulped together and had to be thrown out.
The library card, being plastic and used more often, was just fine.
They always had the best assortment of gags and practical jokes.
As a kid I used to love the black light stuff.