Typically on the first day of an EPCOT festival, I find myself looking adoringly at photos on various social media outlets of the new food, new merchandise, and maybe some special things that may have shown up as a surprise.
Today, though? Today was the first day of the International Festival of the Arts and all day long, I was seeing pictures of how long the line was to purchase a Figment popcorn bucket. Yes, that’s right. A popcorn bucket – the one in the bottom-right of the photo collage below. It comes filled with rainbow popcorn for the price of $25.
The little purple dude is adorable, I’ll give him that. But reports online said the wait time in said line was anywhere from 5 to 7 hours.
I’ll be real honest, I don’t get it. Theme park tickets are not cheap and if you’re going to spend half of your day standing in a line for a plastic popcorn bucket, that just seems like an expensive way to go. Alas, even more expensive than that is the price-gouging that is happening over on eBay. I’m not going to post links to the listings, but you can head there and do a search and you’ll find quite a few. The most expensive one I saw had a “buy it now” price of $275.
Hilariously, there are even some listings for drawings of the bucket. I’m talking pencil and sketchpad drawings. Obviously, people are just trying to be funny and get in on the action, but there are some actual bids on those, so there you go. Art is art after all.
I hear people commenting all the time about how the Disney theme parks in Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Shanghai have the cutest popcorn buckets you’ve ever seen in your lives (along with a lot of their other merch) and they wonder why we can’t get those here at Walt Disney World. Sadly, I believe we have our answer. Disney would need to hire an entire crowd control team just for special popcorn buckets if they were a regular thing.
The sad part about the length of this line today, in my opinion, is that people who just wanted a grilled cheese sandwich with tomato soup served in a super cute little can had to wait in that very same line! Yikes!
Would you wait upwards of 5 hours in line for a special popcorn bucket? I would not. No way. Sound off in the comments below. I can hardly wait to hear your thoughts!