For all of my years spent living in Connecticut (nearly 27 now, though that is not my age) this was my first time visiting the Pez Factory somehow. When I read up about it online they said that it would be $5 to get in and you take a self-guided tour and get a Pez lanyard with admission. Unfortunately, the lanyard itself is just red while it comes with a sort of backstage pass looking tag on it that says “Pez”. The cool thing though is that it prints out a sort of receipt from your trip on it so you have that as a souvenir with the date right down to the exact minute on it. Your paid admission also gets you $2 off in the gift shop, but more on that later.
The first thing I did when I got in there was played their bingo game. It’s free to play and says you get a prize though the woman when we went in said it would be a free Pez dispenser. For a free Pez dispenser, yeah, I’d play their bingo game. I’m not going to show you a picture of the card so you don’t google answers in advance, but you basically have to find what years certain Pez dispensers were released, write them in next to their designated spots and then when you go across, up and down or left to right you win. Just like real bingo. The Pez dispenser of the day was some squirrel thing from “Over the Hedge” or something to that effect. When the employee gave it to me my first reaction was “What is it?” which I think she found about as funny as I did. But hey, free Pez is free Pez and not only do we have this weird dispenser now we also got the candy with it.
I always knew there were a lot of different Pez dispensers, but you never really realize and can appreciate just how many there are until you see them all in one area together. A lot of what I’m going to write should be guided by pictures, but let me say this first: They had someone handing out free Pez that had just been made. You’ve never really had Pez before until you’ve had fresh Pez (and it was raspberry, quite possibly my favorite flavor)
Now the Pez dispensers for sale are $1.99, which is reasonable, and since we had three paid admissions we had a credit of $6 for the gift shop. You can’t use it for cash back (which makes sense) but there is surprisingly no minimum purchase so in some ways it basically means you’ll get a free Pez dispenser with your paid admission. (That is in addition to the Pez of the Day if you win bingo, which is not at all difficult)
So when we left, we got (mostly for my son) all four of the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles dispensers, Wall-E and Eve from that Disney/Pixar movie, Doofenschmertz to complete our Phineas and Ferb collection and then the special one only available from the Pez Factory. This one was actually $4.99 but since its exclusive and comes in the fancy box it was well worth it. Oh yeah, and the $6 coupon for three paid admissions basically bought it and then some.
We probably spent maybe an hour and a half to two hours there, but I saw a lot of kids who were sadly either being held or just kind of walking around aimlessly like, “What am I doing here?” My son was just so excited to see everything Pez related that for him it was like Disneyworld and Christmas combined. So I can’t guarantee how your child might feel about this if they’re not really that into Pez, but it doesn’t have too many breakables and is a seemingly nice way to spend some time without spending too much money (and it’s indoors for those boring winters)
So far this is perhaps the most favorite place in Connecticut of both my son and I, aside from the weekly trip to the library and/or park and that sort of thing. I don’t know why it took me so long to get here, but I will be sure to visit more often now.
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