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Travel

The M&M's Store in London Is Really Odd

M&M's World in Leicester Square seems oddly incongruous, even nestled between the Ben & Jerry’s flagship store and tourist traps selling Kate Middleton shot glasses. How and why does it continue to exist?

M&M’s World in Leicester Square is really fucking strange, both as a concept and a reality. It is a shop split over four floors in one of the most expensive commercial areas of central London. It employs at least 50 people, and its main purpose is to shill relatively pricey memorabilia for a bag of sugar-coated chocolate pellets. And it's somehow still open, three years after it opened its doors.

I know the company has spent the past 20 years cramming their red and yellow “spokescandies” into the public consciousness via movie trailers and Happy Meal giveaways, but I'm still not sure why anyone actually cares.

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I suppose I wouldn’t have found it so odd if I’d come across the store in New York or Tokyo, places where there's a reasonable expectation you'll stumble across people dressed up as sweets for photo-ops. But there’s something about the fact that it’s in the UK that makes in doubly weird; it seems oddly incongruous, even in London’s most consumer-reliant zipcode, nestled between the Ben & Jerry’s flagship store and those tourist traps selling Kate Middleton shot glasses.

When I visited, the majority of people browsing the endless list of branded products weren’t even tourists, but Brits—presumably on a day trip up to London for a $28 burger at the Rainforest Cafe and some M&M’s magnets. Which I found even stranger, considering the whole place had clearly been set up to entice large groups of Austrian schoolchildren wearing matching backpacks.

To try and get my head around the place, I took my camera along one Sunday afternoon last month and shot some photos.

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