No matter where you go, Disneyland, Wisconsin Dells, Rapid City, etc. It seems at every tourist attraction there are a zillion stores and stands screaming that hey have…gasp…FUDGE!
OMG! They have fudge! Have you had the fudge? You have got to try the fudge. You just have too!
I guess it wouldn’t be a vacation without a mouthful of tooth decay with the consistency of poop.
If there was just one place where it originated or something I could see. But any place even the least bit touristy and the major attraction is fudge. Why? What’s the big deal? I can get fudge anytime at home.
I was just in Mackinaw and there were more fudge stores than anything else.
Once upon a time (and maybe still; I haven’t been in many tourist shops lately) it was maple sugar candy. Even if the touristy spot was hundreds of miles from the nearest maple tree, there was maple sugar candy.
Except it doesn’t make sense for there to so many fudge retailers concentrated in one spot. It’s like they’re hitting you over the head with it. “You’re going to eat some goddamned fudge while you are here whether you want to or not.”
The sheer amount of fudge outlets is nothing short of ridiculous. There are fudge stores right next to each other and then across the street from each other. Like the fudge district on an episode of the Simpsons.
It doesn’t even have to be a particularly interesting tourist attraction. Just down the road from where James Dean crashed and died is a place attached to a gas station called “East of Eden Fudge Factory”. Mmmm, death fudge…
“Enjoy your authentic Pilgrim Fudge made with cocoa beans, procured by the oppressed indigenous people of the Amazon. All proceeds go to uphold the pathetic whitewashing of American history. Also, fudge wasn’t invented for another 258 years.”
And yet there’s also an entire store dedicated to saltwater taffy in downtown Leavenworth, WA, which is over a hundred miles from the nearest source of salt water.
(Incidentally, it’s across the street and three doors down from the fudge shop.)
It hits a lot of the criteria for a souvenir gift: it’s compact, can be branded/themed, it’s relatively cheap and simple to manufacture, yet it’s notionally a desirable ‘luxury’ product (so there’s a fairly wide profit margin) and it’s shelf stable, so holidaymakers who don’t have a fridge can store it long enough to take it home, and todays unsold inventory will probably still be good to sell tomorrow.
After going decades without fudge, I recently got a gift of high-end fudge. We’ve been enjoying tiny slices for dessert. It’s really good, but I hope we don’t get anymore.
Could be worse. When someone gifts you fudge from their vacation you can at some point toss it and tell them it was lovely. A fridge magnet you gotta stick on your fridge so each time friend visits they can see how much you appreciated their gift. Or a tacky t-shirt that’s so thin & ill-fitting that it’s barely usable to polish your car. Touristy gifts should be outlawed completely.
There’s also a performative aspect to it that goes well with touristy areas. In the fudge shops we’ve been in when the kids were young, most shops have big granite tables in clear view where the fudge makers spread out the hot fudge goop and fold it over and over with big spatula thingies until it hardens into a slab that they then cut into small blocks. The fudge-making show becomes a mini tourist attraction of its own.
Fudge/confections are a low-price, high-margin, shelf-stable product that can be plausibly branded as “local”. You can do a production run once a year, load up a few small shelves with it, and still score a 70% gross profit margin on a piece that’s nearly a year old.
Of course the “local” concept doesn’t stand up to any serious scrutiny, but it doesn’t need to. It’s not any sort of rare gastronomical achievement. It’s a thing you can can bring home to your neighbor as a “thanks for feeding my cats” gift. But unlike a tchotchke like a snow-globe, they don’t need to store it or keep up with it. They can eat it or give it away. Or after a year or so they can plausibly tell themselves “this food has probably gone bad” and simply discard it without feeling guilty about it.
Places like that usually have Ice Cream shops, lots of restaurants and gift shops. Same kinda thing. Foot traffic looking for things to do = junk food sales.
On a field trip to Mackinac Island*, we convinced one girl that the island was man-made. Specifically constructed in that spot because it was right over the largest deposit of subterranean fudge in the world. Pretty soon, she found herself in the middle of our argument over whether it was “in the world” or “in North America”.
.
*Don’t be like my mom and keep saying Mack-a-nack, desoite decades of people saying “That’s MackinNAW.” Thank you.
Chocolate Moonshine fudge is amazing! And yeah, you can OD on it pretty quickly. The smell alone can get you going. I think I gained ten pounds when I walked into the shop. When we went to the Banana Split Festival in Latrobe they had a booth there but I couldn’t justify both a split and fudge.