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Rene Karam, a Texas novelty store owner, made headlines worldwide last October for one particular hot-selling item: the Osama bin Laden pinata.
By DAVE SCHEIBER, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times, published September 10, 2002
In his first three weeks, he sold 300 for $60 a pop, was featured on CNN, and couldn't keep pace with the demand. "I could have sold a thousand in the first few days if I'd had them in stock," he says.
But on the eve of the first anniversary of the terrorist attacks, Karam isn't pushing the papier-mache terrorist anymore. Demand for the item dwindled after a few months, and Karam became nervous about selling it. It wasn't only that some in his town of McAllen criticized him for capitalizing on tragedy.
He was scared of becoming a terrorist target.
"We're right on the border of Mexico, and terrorists can cross right over through Brownsville," he says. "So I didn't want to draw any extra attention to myself, especially with the anthrax situation. You just don't know what might happen."
Karam's Osama pinata is typical of much of the novelty and patriotic items that enjoyed big sales and widespread media attention in the wake of Sept. 11.
Internet sales of American flags have flagged, reams of Osama toilet paper remain unsold, and the overall novelty craze has gone cold.
"America has a short memory when it comes to tragedy," says Chuck Frank of Michigan Internet company makempay.com. After the attacks, Frank and several business partners sold 8,000 rolls of tissue imprinted with a bin Laden caricature and with the phrase, "Osama, you look flushed" -- along with hundreds of coffee cups and T-shirts.
"We still get a few orders every week, but it's not like it was."
Frank thinks that once U.S. troops went into Afghanistan, the public had a different way to vent its anger: "And that was our whole purpose -- to give people a way to vent, and to kind of help them laugh a little during a time of tragedy."
Frank and his partners realize they may get stuck with untold rolls of bin Laden toilet paper. But they may have a new target -- Saddam Hussein.
"If something happens, we'll be the first to jump on it, I'll tell you that."
At startcollecting.com, which specializes in hard-to-find items, American flags flew out the door after the attacks. With a shortage in stores, Internet sales soared.
"But that lasted until about mid-November, and then it declined," says startcollecting.com owner Tim Lorber. "More stores began stocking flags, and a lot of Web companies were stuck with an overflow."
Case in point: Lorber's company sold the most popular item, car clip-on flags, for about $7. Recently, another company offered him several thousand of the high-end, two-ply-nylon car flags for a quarter apiece.
Lorber still does steady sales with the Sept. 12 edition of the New York Times. He and his staff bought thousands of copies in north New Jersey the morning after the attacks, and currently sell the issues "for between $14.95 and $19.95." And he says he's working on a Sept. 11 scholarship charity called Operation Swatch-It, where celebrities donate a swatch of clothing attached to a trading card.
But for Lorber, flags, pins and 9/11 items have been surpassed by a new big-seller. "It's a trading card like Pokemon called Yu-gi-oh," he says. "Kids love it. They've sold 2.5-billion in Japan.
"So we've moved on to Yu-gi-oh."