{"id":57049,"date":"2014-01-10T05:21:07","date_gmt":"2014-01-10T12:21:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wend.ca\/?p=57049"},"modified":"2020-07-16T19:05:13","modified_gmt":"2020-07-16T23:05:13","slug":"pez-museum-burlingame","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wend.ca\/?p=57049","title":{"rendered":"Pez Museum, Burlingame"},"content":{"rendered":"

Are you a collector?<\/em> This was the first question out of the proprietor’s mouth when I walked into the Pez Museum in Burlingame. Pez collecting is a huge deal in some circles and the museum sees a lot of enthusiasts. I’m not a collector but I do have happy memories from my childhood of shooting candy out of Star Wars characters and thought this a little roadside attraction worth a stop.<\/p>\n

The word Pez is a shortened version of Pfefferminze, which means Peppermint in German\/Austrian. Pez, an Austrian company, originally sold peppermints with their headless dispensers. They’ve always been the only company to make the candy and dispensers; all others are fakes and the only deviation from the well-known candy dispenser was a 1970s gun that allowed you to shoot candy at your friends.<\/p>\n

For obvious reasons, the gun wasn’t on the market for very long.<\/p>\n

The museum contains at least one copy of every Pez dispenser ever made; the world’s largest Pez machine sits by the entrance to the museum.<\/p>\n

The best story about Pez, however, is about eBay (and is a story I did not know). Pierre Omidyar is the founder of eBay and his wife (fianc\u00e9e at the time) is an avid Pez collector. He built her a website to allow her to trade Pez memorabilia with other Pez collectors around the world. This eventually grew and morphed into what we now know as eBay.<\/p>\n