October 6th was to be an exciting day for KISS fans/dorks (aka. The KISS Army) all over the country. This was the day that Walmart stores would unveil KISS Korner. KISS Korner is a special section that features KISS merchandise such as the new album “Sonic Boom”, KISS Potato Heads, blankets, trading cards, and a few other assorted KISS items. Detroit area Walmarts unveiled the KISS Korner early due to the band’s appearance at the legendary Cobo Hall and fans went apeshit up there!
So October 6th gets here, and guess what? NO KISS KORNER! That’s right. I started getting emails from readers all over saying that they had called their local Walmarts and even visited them in person only to find that there was no KISS Korner. To top it all off, the people at the stores seemed to know absolutely nothing about it. I decided to do my own investigative research into this matter since not only am I blogger that looks after my readers, I’m a KISS fan that wants my cool shit! As first I thought maybe it was because some of these folks were in rural areas where the market for KISS stuff wasn’t that great but then I started getting messages from people in NYC about the same thing. Forgive me if I’m wrong but last time I checked, NYC is a HUGE market for KISS. It’s their fucking hometown!
So here’s what I did. I decided to start calling all the Walmarts within a 20 mile radius of my place which totaled 15 (FIFTEEN!) fucking stores. I asked to speak to the store manager or assistant manage of each store and told them that my name was Mr. Thayer, a local representative of the band KISS. I asked them if they had KISS Korner set up in their stores and, are ya read, not ONE manager or assistant manager knew what I was talking about. I read the description of KISS Korner word for word from the Walmart website and they still had no idea what I was talking about. To make it even better, this was on October 9th, 3 days after KISS Korner was to be released. I knew right away what my next step was to be… take it to the big whigs!
I dialed up Walmart’s customer service number and the representative I got was a very polite young lady. I told her that I was calling to find out what stores in my area would have KISS Korner merchandise available and guess what? She had no friggin’ clue what I was talking about. “KISS Korner?” she asked. “What is that?”. I once again referenced Walmarts website word for word and she asked if I could hold for a moment. About 5 minutes later she came back and asked if a supervisor could get back to me in 3-5 business days. Wow… just wow.
So heres the deal. When you are a multi-million dollar machine like KISS and you “proudly” sign on a merchandising deal with another multi-million dollar monster like Walmart, you would think that you would want assurance that your investment and name’s reputation are being upheld. One would also think that if you were on the Walmart end, you would do everything in your power not to piss off KISS. The funny thing is that I fucking hate Walmart and never shop there and this was going to be the only reason for me to even go there.
Upon further investigation, I Googled “trouble finding KISS Korner” and theres a Facebook page full of comments from folks all over having the same experiences that I, Mr. Thayer had. I’m really curious to hear if there is any kind of response from the KISS camp and ol’ Mr. $immons himself. KISS has always prided itself as a band that gave the fans their best. I feel like KISS really let the fans down and have dipped into the Fail pool.
We wanted the best, and we got nothing but disappointment.
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