"Collect Starbucks mugs? How embarrassing."

I feared a wrath of derision when I confessed my cheesy souvenir habit recently in my email newsletter. And that first comment didn't disappoint. How could anyone treasure something so gauche in this bougie travel era of lie-flat seats and $1,000 a night hotels, right?

And then, redemption. Hundreds of you flooded my inbox with tales of your souvenir collections. Mostly cheap, guilty pleasures, from coasters to Christmas ornaments to, yes, shelves of Starbucks mugs. Plus an assortment of quirky items including Pringles cans, Swatch watches, museum neckties and golf-course pencils. The most original entries: Charlie Chaplin T-shirts and foreign-language copies of "Pride and Prejudice."

No matter your travel budget, it turns out, there's something deeply satisfying about bringing home a trinket or two in addition to a gazillion photos. All the better if you make a game out of the souvenir hunt or turn your top tchotchkes into home decor. Retired attorney David Powell calls his magnets-on-sheet-metal collection the Museum of Magnet Art and says it's about to get a new wing in his Florida home.

The biggest appeal of these lowbrow collections -- one reader recalls a co-worker telling his kids that souvenir was French for crap -- are instant memories. I'm sipping coffee out of my "embarrassing" Starbucks mug as I write this and thinking about the climb up the Arc de Triomphe with my daughter on her first visit last year. It is, in short, a joyous hobby.

Lindsey Hulstrom has been inserting coins into those carnival-like penny press machines for nearly 25 years. She writes the dates on them and displays them in penny passports.

The Austin, Texas, chaplain keeps the plastic passport in a dresser drawer. Every time she opens it, she says, "I am taken back in time and marvel at how great my life is to have traveled so much with my husband and son."

Anne Laband brings back a little something from every trip and turns it into a Christmas ornament. There's a friendship bracelet from a volunteer trip to Haiti, a horseshoe found on a Grand Canyon trail and antique lace from a market in Bruges, Belgium. The collection has grown so large, the souvenirs earned their own tree.

"Every item on the tree carries a story. Most are happy, some more sobering," the Alabama woman says. "Pick one -- I'll tell you about it!"

The souvenir displays often double as conversation starters. When Sarina Freedland needs small glasses for Passover at her home in Atlanta, she pulls out her souvenir shot glasses and matches them up to people who have visited that place.

Bill Frazier switched from souvenir T-shirts to koozies last year because he had too many of the latter and the drinkholders are cheap. The retired editor brings them out for parties on his deck in Tennessee.

"Sometimes, a slightly tipsy person will ask me about what I was doing in Jasper, Alberta or Bratislava, Slovakia," he says.

I don't use my Starbucks mugs to entertain, but that's the only time Michael Sullivan and his husband pull them off the shelf.

"If someone is from a city we have, we give them that mug, or if they've traveled to that city we swap stories and memories," the finance executive from Pennsylvania says.

Souvenir hunting is straightforward -- unless you have rules. Some travelers set dollar limits like $5 or $10. Others get more specific.

Melissa Green and her husband, Les Taub, and their friends instituted the TUT policy. The trinket must be tacky, useless and tasteless, said Green.

The "Ts" are easy, the semiretired commercial real-estate banker from New York says: cringeworthy fridge magnets, shot glasses, bottle openers, to name a few. Useless proves to be the biggest challenge. In their TUT hall of fame: A Challenger space shuttle replica made of shells, which they purchased in Orlando.

Souvenirs only make the cut for Californian Rob Singler and his family if they meet three criteria: "godawful" embarrassing, tiny and bearing the name of the vacation spot.

Retired investment banker Betsy Hoaglund collected cheesy souvenirs from each state on business trips. They had to be bought at the airport and reflect the state's culture or image. Her favorite find: a ceramic tray with one end for a coffee mug, the other for a cigarette. It was from North Carolina, home to tobacco giant R.J. Reynolds.

Souvenir collecting is often a solo sport, with spouses and other travel partners tolerating it or quietly culling the collection when no one's looking.

Silva Miner's husband belongs in the hall of fame for spouses of the souvenir obsessed.

On a visit to Versailles two years ago, the gift shop was closed after the family's palace tour. The credit union risk manager from Virginia tried to talk her way in to buy a magnet, to no avail. That night her husband secretly bought another ticket to Versailles and asked their driver to pop by on the way to the airport. Silva bought two magnets because she had now visited twice. Her collection has grown to nearly 200 magnets.

"Looking back I realized how ridiculous I was acting but all I wanted was a cheesy magnet."

If that's not inspiration to buy that garish America 250 snow globe, bootleg World Cup keychain or dress the kids up in Thing 1, 2, 3 T-shirts this long holiday weekend, I don't know what is.

So to all you souvenir snobs, put that in your Starbucks mug and drink it.

Write to Dawn Gilbertson at dawn.gilbertson@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

June 30, 2026 21:00 ET (01:00 GMT)

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