Souvenir shops around the world sell almost the exact same manufactured trinkets, keychains, and snow globes, heavily relying on massive factories in China that simply swap out the printed city names on the bottom.

A closer look

Souvenir shops around the world sell almost the exact same manufactured trinkets, keychains, and snow globes, heavily relying on massive factories in China that simply swap out the printed city names on the bottom. The authentic hand-crafted wooden turtle you haggled for in a Caribbean market was likely shipped in a massive shipping container alongside the authentic hand-crafted wooden bears sold in the Canadian Rockies. Tourists suffer from an irrational compulsion to prove they traveled by purchasing these aggressively useless items, filling their homes with cheap magnets that barely hold up grocery lists on the refrigerator. It is an incredible global supply chain dedicated entirely to the production of future landfill material, perfectly capturing our need to commodify every life experience into a three-dollar piece of painted resin that will sit on a shelf gathering dust for a decade