There was always something illicit about walking into Spencer’s Gifts. Not “illegal” illicit—nobody was slinging black tar heroin behind the lava lamps. But illicit in that very specific suburban way, like sneaking a sip of Smirnoff Ice from your friend’s older brother’s mini-fridge or watching South Park with the volume so low it was practically subliminal messaging.
Spencer’s was the store your mom side-eyed but tolerated, the store you sprinted past with your church youth group, the store where the dim lighting and wall of obscene T-shirts made you feel like you were getting away with something. It was Hot Topic’s weirder, funnier, and significantly more perverted cousin. Hot Topic was about rebellion in an eyeliner-heavy, My Chemical Romance way. Spencer’s was about rebellion in a Big Johnson T-shirt and fart machine way.
But what really made Spencer’s Spencer’s wasn’t just the blacklight posters of mushrooms and scantily clad women that only a 14-year-old boy with a Dragon Ball Z backpack could find truly sophisticated. It wasn’t even the oversized shot glasses that read, “One Tequila, Two Tequila, Floor.” No—Spencer’s was a cultural nexus. It was the last great holdout of the American shopping mall, a place where suburban teens and confused grandmas brushed shoulders while browsing an inventory that could best be described as half smoke shop, half joke shop, and half trailer park garage sale.
The Layout of Chaos
The front of the store was deceptively innocent: lava lamps, mood rings, electric plasma globes that promised to sync to your heartbeat (they didn’t), and a rotating rack of T-shirts that spanned every possible demographic of mall loiterers.
One minute you’d be looking at a Beavis and Butt-Head “I Am Cornholio” shirt, and the next, you’d accidentally lock eyes with a Two Girls One Cup parody tee and rethink every decision that led you to that moment.
Further in, you hit the gag gifts—whoopee cushions, rubber chickens, and an entire display devoted to fake lottery tickets that seemed to exist solely to ruin Thanksgiving dinners. This was the safe zone, the area you could still browse with your mom and not have to engage in any kind of soul-searching about why the back wall seemed… off-limits.
Because the back wall. Oh, the back wall.
The Forbidden Section
Every Spencer’s had a boundary line—some invisible demarcation where the prank gifts ended and the “novelty” sex toys began. You’d be absentmindedly flipping through a book titled 1001 Jokes About Farting and then, bam—right next to it was an adult coloring book called The Kama Sutra for Dummies. And once you crossed that threshold, you were in it.
Spencer’s back wall was where teenage boys went to become men, where bachelorette parties were unknowingly supplied with enough inflatable dildos to cause permanent psychological damage to airport security. You didn’t mean to end up there. Nobody did. But once you were, it was like time slowed down. Did your 8th-grade algebra teacher just walk in? Did the security guard just see you staring at a box labeled The Erector Set: Couples Edition? Is that a vibrating rubber duck? Oh god. Oh no. Get out. Get out now.
The Soul of a Mall Rat
Spencer’s Gifts wasn’t about quality products. Nobody was waking up on Christmas morning hoping for a beer helmet or a ‘Calvin pissing on [insert rival sports team]’ window decal. But Spencer’s wasn’t about the products. It was about the experience—the shared, unspoken knowledge that this store was just a little bit too much. That going in meant temporarily stepping into a space where capitalism and chaos collided, where humor and bad taste were two sides of the same lava-lamp-lit coin.
It was, in retrospect, the perfect symbol of mall culture. Malls were never about shopping. They were about being. About wandering aimlessly, drinking Orange Julius, flipping through CDs at Sam Goody, and ending up at Spencer’s because where else were you going to go?
And now? Well, Spencer’s still exists, somehow. It survived the implosion of shopping malls and the e-commerce revolution. It’s still out there, hiding in the fluorescent hellscape of a dying mall, waiting for a new generation of awkward 13-year-olds to stumble into its blacklight glow, trying to make sense of a store that sells both Rick and Morty socks and vibrating panties.
And maybe that’s the way it should be. Some things—like lava lamps, fart machines, and the thrill of accidentally standing in front of the sex toy section while your mom browses the gag gifts—never really go out of style.
