I would gladly put up money for a t-shirt. I don’t need a coffee mug but nice whisky tumbler engraved with “Straight Dope” to sip a single malt would be nice. 
Running your own store front for a site like this will never work.
A specialty site like Cafe Press will be too expensive and won’t get any notice.
The best bet is doing it via Amazon’s affiliate-type program. Print up the shirts and cups and send them to Amazon. Let them take care of everything else. Also very easy to find and well trusted. Might sell stuff to non-board folk who like that sort of stuff.
But the odds of getting a worthwhile return on investment even for that is quite low.
I thought Cafepress was basically free, except that you hardly make any money off each sale. Was I wrong?
I’d totally buy an SD hoodie. And thing how long the hamsters would be fed just by selling one plane on a treadmill.
Too hard.
The board seems to be stuck with the premise that “we tried that, it didn’t work, we’ve got a warehouse full of merchandise to prove it”.
At least I wish that was their reasoning, not “we’ve got all this ugly merchandise that we have to sell first”, which is stupid, because that merchandise is a sunk cost. You have that cost with or without selling new merchandise. Unfortunately, they have said it is their reasoning. Oh well.
I came close to breaking my SD Coffee Cup tonight- the one with Slug Siggnora on it. I didn’t think it was valuable except for a receptacle for gravy. Oh well.
Well, we have squids and goats. Would you settle for a pet goat? You could name him George, and read to him.