Word: museum
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...Museum-store sales are booming. This year the shops are expected to generate revenues of about $200 million. Sales at Boston's Museum of Science store have nearly doubled during the past three years, to $850,000 for the fiscal year that ended last April 30. At New York City's Met, sales reached $34 million for the year ending June 30, up 85% since 1981. For the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington saw sales from its nine stores and its mail-order catalog hit $34.5 million, up 29% in just one year. Much...
...dramatic growth in museum-store sales partly reflects the sheer variety of products. These range from the sublime to the slightly ridiculous. Staple items include postcards, calendars, notecards and posters. Beyond that, the potpourri is far less predictable. At the Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut one can buy a wooden handcrafted model of a ship ($10,000). Shoppers at Boston's Museum of Science store can take home a tiny piece of the moon, complete with a lunar map locating the crater from which the rock was taken. The single best-selling item in the Smithsonian stores...
Shoppers often enjoy a museum store's ambience. However crowded the gift shopgets, it suggests an artistic milieu impossible to find in, say, a K mart. Says Cindy Marano, a Washington resident who was visiting Chicago's Art Institute last week: "Museum shops are a wonderful place to buy presents. At malls everything seems the same and impersonal...
Many products also carry an artistic cachet. Says Regina Silvers, a spokeswoman for the Museum of Modern Art in New York City: "We're not trendy. We offer functional art with excellent design." Popular reproductions of a vase designed by Alvar Aalto in 1937 sell for up to $135, while the copy of a Tizio lamp, designed by Richard Sapper...
...urge to cuddle does not arise naturally here. "When I first saw these babies," says Virginia Spear, a social worker in the intensive-care nursery, "all I could think of is that they looked like an exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry--all the fetuses in the jars. Some of them aren't much more than fetuses. But then I saw a mother whose baby weighed 1 1b. 5 oz. She was a typical teenager, liked to have a good time, dance, listen to rock music. What she did with that baby was a revelation. I like...