Random Picture #211

Pocky products on display that were eligible for the promotion - these are mostly variations on green tea.

In my post about Nijiya Japanese market, one of the things that I was told and forgot to mention was that the shop is often offered promotional items, but they are so small that they have no chance to display them. During a festival in San Jose, the Nikkei festival, they made an effort to get those items out where customers could see them.

If you look behind the blurred picture of my husband holding an inflated Pocky stick, you can see three enormous reproductions of boxes of Pocky and Glico's Pejoy. I hadn't even noticed those boxes until after I'd taken this picture as I was focusing on the sticks themselves. There was a sign at the check-out counter which said that you got "free Pocky swag" if you bought three or more boxes of Pocky. My husband is holding a sample of said swag.

Obviously, the swag are leftover inflated sticks from the display that you can see behind them. No, they weren't going to climb up and take a stick out of the display. There was a trash bag with the leftovers sitting next to a shelf with stock and in front of a refrigerator case. While hardly an elegant presentation, at least it made it easy fro them to tell us what the swag was. That made it all the easier for me to decide it wasn't worth buying three boxes of Pocky, particularly since I've never been the world's greatest Pocky fan anyway.

I'm curious about whether or not my readers would want this sort of collectible item. Would you buy three boxes of Pocky (at $1.69 each/about 170 yen) just to get one of these tubes?