Hello Kitty Fans Are Searching for 50th-Anniversary Merch in Sanrio Stores to No Avail

Sanrio never expected to create a worldwide phenomenon in Hello Kitty. Even still, their stores are hard to find.

Published July 19 2024, 3:23 p.m. ET

In 1974, Japanese merchandising company Sanrio introduced us to Hello Kitty, a character who would become synonymous with childlike joy, innocence, and for the adults of 2024, nostalgia. 50 years later, the world is coming together to celebrate the Japanese character’s “life” and times as a ubiquitous icon. In doing so, many people want to visit the Sanrio stores to get Hello Kitty’s 50th-anniversary merch.

But as people look for Hello Kitty’s celebratory merchandise, they’ve noticed that there are far fewer Sanrio stores than there used to be. At one point, there were thousands of Sanrio stores across the world, and now there are just a few. So what happened to the Sanrio stores?

The Sanrio stores were mostly discontinued as online shopping became more popular.

Back in the day, online shopping was a rarity. It was much more common to drive to the store or mall to buy what one’s heart desired. But in 2024, brick-and-mortar stores are far less popular than online stores. So it makes sense that Sanrio stores may have gone mostly out of business.

Back in 2017, Redditors started to notice the decline in Sanrio stores, and at one point, Sanrio was fully online. Luckily, by 2024, some Sanrio stores still exist in California and Hawaii. While the big Sanrio superstores are no longer in business, there are nine Sanrio locations in California and one in Honolulu.

The California Sanrio stores are mostly all in SoCal with locations in Arcadia, Irvine, Los Angeles, Monrovia, Pasadena, Riverside, Temple City, Topanga, and Torrance. And while there aren’t too many Sanrio-specific brick-and-mortars, there are plenty of stores that still sell Sanrio’s merchandise and more specifically, Hello Kitty merch!

Hello Kitty isn’t actually a cat, according to Sanrio.

As we celebrate Hello Kitty’s 50th birthday, we’re reminded of the 2015 bombshell that Hello Kitty isn’t actually a cat. At the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, a retrospective called “Hello! Exploring the Supercute World of Hello Kitty” centered on Hello Kitty, Sanrio told the curator that Hello Kitty is not a cat but instead a girl.

“That’s one correction Sanrio made for my script for the show. Hello Kitty is not a cat,” curator and anthropologist Christine R. Yano told the Los Angeles Times. “She’s a cartoon character. She is a little girl. She is a friend. But she is not a cat. She’s never depicted on all fours. She walks and sits like a two-legged creature. She does have a pet cat of her own, however, and it’s called Charmmy Kitty.”

They also shared some fun facts about Hello Kitty — her name is Kitty White and she was born in the suburbs of London, where she lives with her parents and twin sister, Mimmy, who wears a yellow bow on her right ear. Kitty even has a boyfriend named Dear Daniel, who was introduced to Sanrio fans in 1999, which makes him 25 years younger than Kitty. Talk about an age-gap relationship!

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