marketing mastermind

hello.
hello kitty.
i love you hello kitty.
my current items of inane desires:

hello kitty waffle maker (!!!)

she's a heartless corporate soul, mercilessly robbing little girls of their allowance money around the world while distracting them with overpowering cuteness.

she was the one who is to blame for my untreatable shopping addiction - my gateway drug of all time.

backstory: when i was little, my mom used to drag me along to the mall all the time. (her shopping addiction is the mother(ha.ha) of all shopping addictions; she is now beyond the hope of reason or rehab). at that young age, i did not yet have an appreciation for the wonders of retail at the palace of all shopping aka South Coast Plaza. to me, shopping = hours upon hours upon hours of sitting in clothes racks waiting for my mom to finish. even worse, my brother never let me take his gameboy out of the house because of my terrible track record for losing (his) things. so to shorten this hellish experience, i would throw temper tantrums to get my mom to leave early. i'm talking about the kind of temper tantrums i now see in public that make me swear you never wanna have kids. yes, i was that brat.

i guess i began to develop some smarts, because at some point I started to hustle with my mom;
i would make a deal with her - 1 temper tantrum in exchange for 1 item at the Hello Kitty store. AND, not some dinky item like a wooden pencil or a stick of gum. again, complete brat + my mom spoils me rotten.

my collection of items grew to enough items to stock a small store. metal lunch boxes, stationary galore, photo holders, plastic wallets, plush toys, calendars, pens, pencil cases, you name it. i had all the characters too--they progressed as i got older: from hello kitty -> spotti dotti -> kerropi -> pekkle -> badz maru. by the time i hit badtz maru, i was in my "pre-teens" and was fully familiarized with the mall. that's when i began venturing out to other stores, and waddyakno, i became a fullblown crack i mean mallhead. sanrio = my gateway drug

sanrio's retail prices for their completely useless but-oh-soo-cute junk are not low either. they have a pretty strong monopoly in their little niche market. i used to get stamp cards for every $1 i spent at that store...i collected over 300 stamps, probably more because i lost a lot of stamp cards too.

anyway, no i haven't learned. here is my modern day collection as a 23 year old. most of them are functional items, at least! i wish i had kept all my old stuff- a lot of it sadly got sold at garage sales for 50 cents or less. despaiiiiiiiiiir :(

humidifier

puffy stickers (yes, defacing my laptop)

key cover

bandaids

mp3 player

there are more . but for fear of be written off as a complete and utter weirdo, i shall stop.

but this just shows, she has infected every crevice of the retail market! jewelry with kimmora lee simmons (she has a $3K ceramic/diamond watch), makeup with mac, apparel with tokixdoki, electronics, kitchen ware, she's EVERYWHERE. rich bitch. jeal.