Make a face pez full#
Pierre Omidyar, the 31-year-old founder and chairman of the San Jose company, paid tribute to a ballroom full of Pezheads during a kickoff reception at the show. And by far the hottest hub for trading Pez items is eBay - which, keen on keeping its flock loyal (particularly as e-commerce behemoth enters the online auction battlefield), sponsored the Pez-a-thon. But these days, the bulk of Pez trading occurs on the Internet. Many visitors came to check out the latest or rarest of these time-honored plastic novelties, whose hinged lids release candies from the dispenser's neck. Potato Head, selling for $3,000, for example, or an extremely rare 1980 set of three French cartoon characters (Asterix, Obelix and Miraculix) for $8,000. Many of the dealers, who have known each other for years from the Pezheads list, rented rooms a couple nights before the public trade show to network and try to snatch "wholesale" deals on the hottest items - an 18-piece "Make-a-Face" dispenser, ` la Mr. Dealers came from all over the world, including Austria, the world headquarters of privately held Pez. The crowd ranged in age from kids who could barely see over the tables of Mickey Mouse, Daffy Duck and zillions of other dispensers to hunched-over elderly folks holding their grandchildren's hands. The one-day Pez-a-thon show in Los Angeles, open to the public for $5 a pop, drew some 1,200 people in late March. "Thanks to the Net and eBay, I think I could bring in at least $2,000 a month," he said - a sum that goes a lot further in South Dakota than in the Bay Area. In a town of 2,000 residents and scant demand for computer salespeople, Gochal plans to turn their 800-plus Pez collection (plus untrademarked Pez boxers, Pez watches and more) into a home-based business.
Gochal, 33, a computer salesman living in Mountain View, Calif., will soon head east to move in with his fiancie. Thronson, 28, is a substance abuse counselor in South Dakota and has collected Pez dispensers for several years. Ugly" Pez, its wrinkly green face resting on a lighter-shaped neck Thronson's calf featured a brown-faced "Bullwinkle" head with a yellow dispenser. On Gochal's leg stretched a four-inch design of a "Mr. But the blush on their faces vanished once they asked me if I wanted to check out their tattoos. Initially, they were embarrassed to talk about how their romance began over the "Pezheads" e-mail list and then hit full bloom when they met at another Pez convention in 1996. Mary Thronson and Brian Gochal are two Pez devotees who recently attended a Pez collectors convention in Los Angeles. Pez-dispenser devotees have not only built communities online - their obsession has inspired the founding of billion-dollar companies, and even brought couples together. But the Internet has kicked this process into overdrive. Avid collectors of all sorts of items - from antique cuckoo clocks to Roman coins - have always formed communities of like mind and gathered periodically in person to trade and schmooze.