Only hours after the Buckeyes cashed in on five Miami turnovers to win the Fiesta Bowl, many stores in Columbus were cashing in on the Buckeyes’ victory.

Fans lined up outside stores early the next morning in an attempt to be among the first to own national championship merchandise.

“The power went out that morning because of an accident down the street, so we set up outside,” said Rob Cohen, a manager at Conrad’s. “We had people lined up out in the cold. We had five or six hundred T-shirts, but we sold out within an hour. It was like football season and Christmas all over again.”

“It was absolutely insane,” said Julie Guerra, an assistant manager at College Traditions. “We had over 1,000 T-shirts, and we sold out within an hour and a half.”

The first national championship merchandise was mostly T-shirts, sweatshirts and hats, but stores now have a wider variety of national championship gear.

“We have everything from pins to keychains to mugs. We’re getting a blanket,” Guerra said. “We have banners and posters; pretty much anything you can think of to put ‘national champions’ on.”

Many fans were looking for the national championship hats worn by the football team immediately after the game, but most were unsuccessful in finding them.

“There were only 9,000 of them printed, and we won’t get another shipment until Feb. 15,” said Amy Snyder, a sophomore in clothing and textiles who works at the University Bookstore. “They didn’t print enough because they didn’t expect Ohio State to win. If they would’ve expected us to win, they would’ve printed 25,000.”

Many out-of-town merchants set tents up throughout the Columbus area, living in hotels and selling national championship merchandise on street corners. Most of these vendors plan on leaving by mid-week.

Despite business slowing down a little, stores are still much more busy than normal.

“It’s less busy today than yesterday, but it’s still pretty steady,” Cohen said. “Saturday is going to be another big event over at the stadium, so we figure we’ll be busy for that.”

Store owners said they are pleased with the extra profit, but the large increase in business for them doesn’t necessarily mean an economic boom for the city of Columbus. Economics professor Paul Evans said local Buckeye fans’ extra spending on OSU merchandise does not have much of an effect on the local economy.

“They’re buying one thing instead of another,” Evans said. “If somebody sells OSU stuff and they’re doing better, somebody selling something else is doing worse. If it were to help the economy, it would have to come from foreigners.

“If there are a bunch of people from Florida buying OSU stuff because their team got beat by OSU, that would help, but I suspect enthusiasm for OSU stuff is a fairly local phenomenon,” he said.

While the bulk of merchandise is bought by Ohioans, there is some demand from out of state.

“I just took three phone orders within a period of about five minutes,” Snyder said.

“Two of the orders were from the Seattle area, and the other was from Nashville. We’ve gotten a lot of calls,” he said.

“It’s starting to slow down a little bit in the store, but we do phone orders and mail orders, and that’s still picking up and it’s going to get even crazier,” Guerra said.