On a rainy Wednesday afternoon, a novelty toy and games store in the quiet Brooklyn neighbourhood of Cobble Hill was seeing much busier foot traffic than usual.<\/p>\n
Inside, the shop was packed with cameramen and customers, while passersby looked inside, asking: “Where’s the bird?”<\/p>\n
Art of Play has found itself at the centre of a social media storm since the weekend when Grammy-winning musician Kelly Clarkson complained online that the boutique store would not let her buy a singing and dancing mechanical bird that was perched on the wall.<\/p>\n
The Since U Been Gone singer claimed she was “looked at as if I couldn’t afford” the bird – which she said had a price tag of $15,000 (\u00a311,000).<\/p>\n
“Y’all should go check out Art of Play in Brooklyn if you enjoy being treated like Julia Roberts’ character in Pretty Woman,” she said, referring to a scene from the 1990 romantic comedy film where Roberts’ character is treated poorly by staff at a shop, who imply she cannot afford various items.<\/p>\n
In a follow-up post on social media, Clarkson said the store had told her the bird cost $15,000 and that they could find her something else “comparable”.<\/p>\n
Art of Play has defended how it treated the star on social media, saying the wooden bird – which is called Molly – is permanently attached to the wall and is not for sale. <\/p>\n
It said that during Clarkson’s five-minute visit on Saturday, an employee suggested to her that she could buy an identical bird for $15,000.<\/p>\n
They also said they had offered her a different singing bird for $2,000 from a clock-making shop in Germany, which she could have purchased that day.<\/p>\n
“Imagine our surprise when our small local business was suddenly attacked by eight million people who have never visited our store,” Art of Play said. <\/p>\n
“It’s been a surreal experience to be the focus of such widespread outrage after just one mention by a celebrity.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On a rainy Wednesday afternoon, a novelty toy and games store in the quiet Brooklyn neighbourhood of Cobble…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":802902,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[6491,96,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-802901","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/802901","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=802901"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/802901\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/802902"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=802901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=802901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=802901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}