Oprah's Favorite Things
Based on Wikipedia: Oprah's Favorite Things
Every November, something extraordinary happened to certain small business owners across America. Their websites would crash. Their phone lines would jam. They'd go from making products eight hours a day to twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The cause? A single mention on what became the most powerful product endorsement platform in television history: Oprah's Favorite Things.
The segment, which ran on The Oprah Winfrey Show from the 1990s through 2010, transformed an annual gift guide into a cultural phenomenon that combined the excitement of a game show, the generosity of a benefactor, and the commercial impact of a Super Bowl advertisement—all wrapped in the personal stamp of approval from the most influential woman in American media.
The Anatomy of a Television Event
The concept was elegantly simple. Once a year, typically during Thanksgiving week, Oprah Winfrey would share products she genuinely enjoyed with her studio audience. But here's what made it spectacular: every single person in that audience would receive every single item on the list. For free.
The timing was deliberate. The segment drew inspiration from "My Favorite Things," the beloved song from The Sound of Music—"Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens," and all that. But instead of warm woolen mittens, Oprah's audiences might find themselves going home with cashmere sweaters from Ralph Lauren, the latest iPod, or in one memorable instance, brand new Volkswagen Beetles.
The Favorite Things episode consistently drew the highest ratings of any Oprah Winfrey Show episode each year. This wasn't accidental. The show's producers understood something fundamental about human psychology: anticipation multiplies excitement. They never announced when the special episode would be taped. Audiences were often selected based on specific characteristics—teachers one year, Hurricane Katrina volunteers another—which meant ordinary ticket-seekers had slim chances of stumbling into the windfall.
The Oprah Effect: When Endorsement Becomes Economic Force
Scott Schroeder, the chief financial officer of Garrett Popcorn Shops, watched his company's website receive over 100,000 hits on the afternoon their product appeared on the show. December sales jumped by more than 100 percent. His popcorn makers went from standard business hours to round-the-clock production.
This wasn't unique to Garrett Popcorn. The phenomenon became so predictable that business analysts gave it a name: the Oprah Effect. For major corporations with robust supply chains and deep pockets, a Favorite Things mention was pure profit. For small businesses with limited staff and handmade products, it could be both a blessing and a crisis.
Imagine running a boutique bakery. You make excellent brownies. Your loyal customers love you. Then Oprah mentions your brownies to twenty million viewers. Suddenly you need to fulfill ten thousand orders by Christmas, you have three employees, and your mixer can only handle fifty batches a day. The Oprah Effect created overnight sensations, but it also created overnight operational nightmares.
What Made the List
The products Oprah championed reveal fascinating patterns about American consumer culture across two decades.
The 2002 list organized gifts into four categories: food favorites, beauty and body care, books and home goods, and high-tech discoveries. That year's tech offerings included a Samsung camera phone—revolutionary at the time—and something called a "wafer-thin CD system," a product category that would be virtually extinct within a decade.
By 2004, when teachers filled the audience, the gifts reflected both aspiration and practicality. A Dell thirty-inch widescreen television represented the cutting edge of home entertainment. The Maytag Neptune washer and dryer addressed the reality that teachers, like most Americans, still had laundry to do. An OfficeMax gift certificate acknowledged that someone needed to buy all those classroom supplies.
The 2005 episode took on profound emotional weight. That audience consisted entirely of Hurricane Katrina volunteers—people who had sacrificed their time and resources to help Gulf Coast residents after one of America's deadliest natural disasters. They received BlackBerry devices, Burberry coats, UGG boots, and Apple iPods. The juxtaposition was striking: luxury goods given to people who had witnessed devastating loss.
The Year Everything Changed
Then came 2006, and Oprah did something nobody expected.
Instead of heaping products on her audience, she gave each person a credit card loaded with one thousand dollars and a camcorder. The instructions: use the money to do something kind for someone else, and record it.
This pivot revealed something important about Winfrey's understanding of her own cultural power. The segment had always been about generosity, but it had become increasingly about consumption—about the thrill of receiving expensive things. The 2006 experiment redirected that energy outward, transforming audience members from recipients into benefactors.
The traditional format returned in 2007, but the philosophical seed had been planted.
When the Economy Broke the Formula
November 2008 arrived in the midst of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Lehman Brothers had collapsed two months earlier. Unemployment was surging. Retirement accounts had been decimated. Americans were scared.
Oprah faced a genuine dilemma. Her Favorite Things segment was built on abundance, on the joy of luxury, on the fantasy that everyone deserved cashmere and champagne. But celebrating expensive consumption while millions of Americans faced foreclosure seemed tone-deaf at best, cruel at worst.
Her solution was unprecedented. The November 26, 2008 episode was titled "How to Have the Thriftiest Holiday Ever!" The gifts cost "next to nothing" and emphasized do-it-yourself craftsmanship. Viewers submitted ideas for gratitude boxes filled with handwritten notes, treasure boxes stuffed with meaningful mementos, and "swap parties" where friends exchanged unwanted items.
For the first time, audience members didn't receive most of the featured gifts—because the gifts were ideas, not products. The segment gave away a compilation album and a novel by David Wroblewski, but the real message was revolutionary for a show built on conspicuous giving: presence matters more than presents.
Jimmy Kimmel's show mocked the change with a fake segment showing Oprah distributing thumb tacks to dismayed audience members. But the satire missed the point. Winfrey had read the national mood correctly. Flaunting expensive gifts in late 2008 would have damaged her brand far more than any jokes about frugality.
The Grand Finale
The recession lingered through 2009, and for the first time in years, there was no Favorite Things episode at all. The Huffington Post broke the story in November. No official explanation was given, though the ongoing economic uncertainty made elaborate gift-giving feel inappropriate.
Then came 2010, the final season of The Oprah Winfrey Show after twenty-five years on the air. Winfrey went out with the biggest Favorite Things promotion in the segment's history, spread across two episodes—the only time she'd ever done that.
The "Ultimate Favorite Things" episodes aired on November 19 and 22, 2010. Several products were callbacks to previous years, creating a greatest-hits quality. But the centerpieces were spectacular: a seven-day cruise on Royal Caribbean's Allure of the Seas (then the largest cruise ship ever built), round-trip airfare on United Airlines to reach the ship, five-year Netflix memberships, Sony fifty-two-inch 3D televisions, and—in the final episode's climax—brand new 2012 Volkswagen Beetles, scheduled for delivery the following May.
The car giveaway echoed one of the most famous moments in television history, when Oprah had given away Pontiac G6 sedans in 2004 with the immortal line: "You get a car! You get a car! Everybody gets a car!" That earlier giveaway had actually been controversial because recipients faced significant tax bills on their windfall, a lesson the show presumably learned from.
The Audience as Spectacle
If you've seen clips from Favorite Things episodes, you probably remember the screaming. The crying. The jumping. The disbelief.
Audience reactions became almost as famous as the gifts themselves. Men and women alike would dissolve into hysterical tears. People would clutch their faces, double over, grasp at neighbors. The emotional displays were so intense, so seemingly disproportionate to the situation, that they became targets of satire.
Saturday Night Live produced a memorable parody where audience members literally tore the studio apart in frenzied anticipation. The writers understood something real: there was something almost unsettling about watching adults lose complete emotional control over consumer products.
But the reactions weren't actually about the products. They were about recognition. About being chosen. About the impossible fantasy of abundance actually materializing. For most audience members, particularly those selected for special circumstances—teachers, volunteers, people who had struggled—the gifts represented something beyond their material value. They represented being seen by the most famous woman in America and deemed worthy of generosity.
Winfrey herself acknowledged the phenomenon with characteristic self-awareness. Behind-the-scenes footage that later aired on her cable network showed her laughing at particularly extreme reactions. She wasn't mocking her audience. She was acknowledging the absurdity while understanding its emotional truth.
The Critical Perspective
Not everyone celebrated the Favorite Things phenomenon. The website The A.V. Club published a satirical feature based on the 2007 list called "Oprah's Favorite Thing or Symptom of Clinical Depression?" The joke highlighted how generic some selections could seem—beauty products, kitchen gadgets, self-help books—and questioned whether the enthusiasm was manufactured.
Critics also noted the uncomfortable economics. Small businesses that couldn't scale quickly enough might actually suffer from sudden demand they couldn't meet. Disappointed customers who couldn't get products would blame the companies, not Oprah. And the cycle of anticipation-fulfillment-desire that the segment encouraged was, fundamentally, a celebration of materialism dressed in the language of generosity.
These critiques had merit. But they also missed what made Favorite Things resonate so deeply. Americans have always had a complicated relationship with wealth and consumption. The segment allowed viewers to participate vicariously in abundance, to imagine themselves as the lucky audience members, and to feel that someone powerful cared about bringing them joy. Whether that's beautiful or troubling probably depends on your perspective.
The Afterlife
The Oprah Winfrey Show ended in 2011, but Favorite Things continued in other forms. O, The Oprah Magazine published its own annual gift guide, sometimes called "The O List," sometimes sharing the Favorite Things branding. A two-hour special aired on the Oprah Winfrey Network in 2012, featuring an audience of thirty people who each received over ten thousand dollars worth of products.
In 2017, the format migrated to Rachael Ray's talk show, with Gayle King serving as Winfrey's representative. Only one audience member, chosen by drawing, actually received all 102 items on that year's list—a significant departure from the democratic abundance of the original format.
The legacy persists in subtler ways. When Winfrey's 2019 list included the Orolay Amazon Coat—a puffy jacket that had already been gaining popularity—the inclusion helped the product go genuinely viral. Even without a studio audience receiving free gifts, the Oprah endorsement still carries commercial weight that few other celebrities can match.
What It Meant
Oprah's Favorite Things was, depending on how you view it, either one of the most generous annual traditions in television history or one of the most effective marketing platforms ever created. It was probably both.
The segment understood something essential about American culture: we love gift guides, we love surprises, we love feeling that we've discovered something special, and we love watching other people experience overwhelming joy. Winfrey synthesized all of these impulses into appointment television that drove real economic impact.
She also demonstrated remarkable sensitivity to cultural moments. The pivot to kindness in 2006, the embrace of frugality in 2008, the cancellation in 2009, the spectacular farewell in 2010—each reflected an awareness that excess has its season, and even the queen of generosity needed to read the room.
Today, gift guides proliferate across every magazine, website, and social media platform. Influencers share their favorite things constantly. The format Oprah popularized has been democratized and diluted. But nobody has replicated the specific magic of a studio audience erupting in tears over popcorn and pajamas, cashmere and camcorders. That required a particular person at a particular moment in media history, and both the person and the moment have passed.
The Volkswagen Beetles from that final 2010 episode were delivered to their recipients in May 2011, a few weeks after The Oprah Winfrey Show aired its last episode. Somewhere, presumably, people are still driving them—physical artifacts of a television era when one woman's favorite things could crash websites, transform businesses, and make strangers weep with gratitude on national television.