What Sells in the Hospital Gift Shop?

 

What are the best sellers at the Duke Regional Hospital’s gift shop? Baby gifts? Flowers? Toiletry kits? No…. The best sellers are candy and chips.  

I find this surprising in a facility dedicated to health and healing. Plenty of patients probably are hospitalized with heart disease and diabetes and who knows what else for over-indulging for years in high-carbohydrate junk food.

The main customers in the gift shop are hospital staff, but there is a steady trickle of patients and family of patients who also go shopping there. 

The above photo is the wall of best-sellers, although I couldn’t get the candy-bar part of the wall nor the soft drinks in the picture. The absolute best-sellers are the so-called “penny candy” in plastic bowls across the top of the display.

Penny candy doesn’t cost a penny anymore. It ranges in price from 5 cents to 20 cents per piece, and I often sympathize with customers who want to complain about it. They bring fistfuls of penny candy to the counter and then go back for more. Friday, one woman brought over the entire display bowl full of some kind of peppermint candy and dumped it on the counter – she wanted all of it. I counted 61 pieces at 10 cents each. She also purchased Junior Mints and York Peppermint Patties, so she must be a peppermint lover. 

One of the best-selling penny candy on Fridays is Reese’s small peanut butter cups. Another is Long Boys coconut juniors. I never had even seen a Long Boys, but I feel sure I would like them. Chocolate Tootsie Rolls (the sticky rolls, not the Tootsie Pop suckers which we also sell) are popular. At the risk of sounding like my mother, I want to tell people – “No, that will stick in your teeth and give you cavities!” In fact, sometimes I want to yell, “Don’t buy this stuff; it’s bad for you!” But I just smile, count the candy, and ring up the purchase.

(I never liked Tootsie Rolls in Halloween candy; I always threw them out. What the gift shop sells is twice as long as what used to get tossed into my Halloween bag.)

We sell a lot of chips, too, at $1.50 a paltry bag, and sometimes the $3.50 little cup of dip (salsa or cheese) to go with the chips. If you look closely at the photo, on the far right, you also will see some sort of oval heat-up meal costing $3.50 each, which people actually purchase as a meal. How do I know this? One woman told me she brings them home to her husband for his dinner, and he loves them. Put some crackers with it, and it makes a fine meal, she said. That just made me sad.

We sell quite a bit of individual pain killers like Advil that hang with the candy. 

Customers also purchase drinks to go with their junk food – often Coke products, but also water and vitamin water. The cost of drinks in the gift shop (around $1.50 depending on what you buy) is apparently less than in the hospital cafeteria.

In the photo, there are some things I have never sold, like beef jerky, but then I only volunteer on Fridays. It’s possible that by Friday, people are tired and just want to eat candy and chips.