The hell of London’s ‘American’ candy stores

The British often complain about an invasion of Americana, from burger joints to twangy accents picked up from television. I love my adopted countrymen, but for an American living far from home, these complaints can be tiresome.

However, there is one Yankee invasion I hate as much as the locals do: American candy stores. There are now nine of them on London’s Oxford Street alone. A guy called Chase Manders is to blame; he started importing and selling American candy to Britain 18 years ago and opened Kingdom of Sweets on Oxford Street in 2012. Soon after, stores that once sold knickknacks to tourists started muscling in.

I paid a visit to see what all the fuss was about. Could these shops take me back to my childhood? The answer was no. I went to Kingdom of Sweets and to the nearly adjacent American Candy Land and found them to be almost identical in decor, and fully identical in merchandise.

London’s ‘American candy stores’ are most un-American. America is known for excess. Anything you want, any flavour, style, colour, any size, as long as it’s EXTRA EXTRA-LARGE. Choice is a form of wealth. So why not sell American candy to those Europeans who’ve seen these tantalising products in expensive American movies and television?

Real Americans don’t go to these candy stores. We don’t even really have them in America — except M&M’s World (more on that horror later). You can buy candy in any corner store, hardware store, gas station or pharmacy in the US. We rarely have stores just for candy. You can get it anywhere, and that’s how we like it.

I expected these shops to be soulless tourist traps, like so many recent additions to Oxford Street.