For the release of 20th Century Fox's The Simpsons Movie, they teamed up with 11 lucky 7-Eleven stores across the US to temporary refit themselves as Kwik-E Marts. Read all about it. With The Simpsons Movie released this weekend, i thought it'd be a grand idea to head down to the closest one, located just south west of Chicago.
The place was a bit more crowded than I thought it would have been. They had one of their strong-armed employees manning the door, only letting in a certain amount of people at a time.
It's rather interesting seeing so many people showing up for such an obvious marketing gimmick. Inside housed several shelves of Simpsons merchandise and products emulating products in the Simpsons cartoon. The most prominent of these real-life Simpsons products at this particular location were those pink dough-nuts and Squishees.
The slurpee, i mean, squishee machine was actually suffering from overuse and wasn't properly chilling the contents of my sugar water. But then had plenty of those cups to fill.. They also had mountains of those dough-nuts.
Good lord.. Apparently if you bought 25 of these dough-nuts, you'd get a free Kwik-E Mart name badge.
Unfortunately, the other real-life Simpsons products had been a little too popular. They were completed sold out of Buzz Cola in a can. They did have signage up on the fountain drink machine though.
They only had a very sparse few boxes of Krusty-Os remaining, but in order to keep their stock, added an outragous stipulation of offering them to customers with purchases of $150 or higher.
The cashier was complaining to her co-workers about people always asking about them, but they replied, "no, we cannot make a sign about their cost.. something something.." I'm guessing that this $150 price tag is YMMV.
The Kwik-E Mart housed plenty of plastic full sized Simpsons characters too.
All in all, it was pretty fun to see so many people excited about The Simpsons. It's somewhat ironic to see so many kids there too, who hadn't even been born when this show got its start on Tracey Ullman in 1987, and began airing on its own in 1989.
I ended up buying a squishee, a dough-nut, and a Radioactive Man comic. no Krusty-Os or Buzz Cola :/
