I had the game (I’d say “board game” but there’s no board).
My kids have four feet and fur, and don’t seem to appreciate their humans’ humor, for some reason. (“Yes, yes, human. You’re very amusing, now get on with the feeding.”) However I can’t help but note that my 10 year old niece often has the same expression that I see from our cats. The adults in her life are mostly a collection of oddball geeks - her mother’s a microbiologist, her father’s a programmer, and the rest of the family includes librarians, college professors, other scientists, and the like. (Yeah, the poor kid is doomed to be One Of Us.)
We’ve been introducing her to our terrible, terrible jokes her entire life! Again, poor doomed kid. 
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We generally didn’t get these cereals, because (1) we would fight over who got the prize and (2) most (not all) of the time, cereals with prizes had more sugar than my mom was willing to allow.
The first issue was somewhat resolved when we were old enough to agree to take turns picking out the cereal.
The second issue was resolved (for me) by making up the sugar deficit from some other source. If all we had was (unfrosted) shredded wheat or plain Cheerios, I’d just add my own sugar, using a tablespoon. Or, I might raid the pantry and eat a lump of brown sugar. One time I opened a can of frosting that was supposed to be for my younger sister’s birthday cake. Every morning I ate a little more until, when mom went to finish the cake, there was an empty can of frosting.
“What happened to all the frosting!? Did one of you eat it?” My younger sister had no idea, while I blamed it on my youngest sister (who would’ve been about 3, if not quite that old). I think my parents knew better. My dad sat us on the stairs and lectured us about lying, and that it put Richard Nixon out of office. I let my youngest sister take the rap.
The rule on sugar cereals was relaxed if relatives were visiting, or we went out-of-town. My grandparents would keep a stock of sugar cereals for us. One time in 1981 or 1982 we went for a visit, and were pleasantly surprised to find that they still had Waffelos – but the reason they still had them is because the box was at least a year old, waiting for more grandkids to visit.
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Once Meat Loaf made it clear I’d never find a Coup de Ville in a box, I lost all interest in the product.
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I initially read that as ‘Cracker Laphroaigs’ and got really excited.
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Cracker Jacks used to be manufactured in the south side of Chicago, around 79th. and Pulaski. You could smell the fantastic scent of the product from several miles away. They had a giant Cracker Jack box in front of their plant.
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I seem to recall that Kinder Eggs tried the “use the code inside for a free online game!” trick a few years ago. Evidently it was so unpopular that it did not pan out.
I think the last time I got a Kinder Egg prize, it was some nonsense collection of perforated paper tokens for some game I couldn’t be bothered to figure out. At least it kept the durable yellow capsule.
Seems the only way to go for plastic tat nowadays is Christmas crackers. Some things you just don’t mess with.
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Yes young ones, in the late 50’s & early 60’s some laundry detergent brands occasionally even used to include a plate or a bath towel in big boxes of the stuff. 'Collect the whole set!"
Economically, these items certainly had less value than the detergent they outweighed/displaced, but - prizes!
Tune in at 11 for the social frenzy induced by S&H Green Stamps.
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[quote=“Boundegar, post:20, topic:78706”]They’re selling nostalgia, which is to say, fun yesterday. If you want fun today, you’re out of luck.[/quote]What an intriguing concept. I guess all those unplayed games that have accumulated in my Steam library must be “fun tomorrow”.
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To be fair some 90% of my unplayed steam games are from humble indie bundles where I was interested just one or two of the plethora of games.
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Fun fact, Quaker Oats was the first company to include a premium with their cereal. Even though Wiki claims it was Kelloggs, I swear I just read an article that said Quaker Oats packed a small dish in their oats in the late 1800s.
…is that in 1896, 1960, 1980 - it was profitable - and had they continued to make a good product, it would still be (barring FTA’s that screw with our economy)
Now, instead of focusing on quality, they instead calculate how many hundreds of employees they can fire and how much sawdust a human can eat just to turn $1.00 into $1.01.
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Looks like you could fir a full size motorcycle in that box for a prize, if you wanted!
The phreaker Captain Crunch got his nick because the toy whistles included in Cap’n Crunch boxes produced a 2600 hz tone you could use as the control tone on single frequency phone systems.
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The Cracker Jack factory building shown in your photo was at 4800 West 66th Street, which is on Cicero Avenue, south of Midway Airport, in the Bedford Park neighborhood.
The original and main Tootsie Roll factory – which is still very much in production – is at 7401 South Cicero Avenue, a mile south and on the other side of the street. That’s probably the factory you’re thinking of.
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Can’t remember any of the items I got from collecting S&H stamps, but I amassed an entire set of dishes from my savings & loan. A nice 20-piece porcelain set, with silver rims and blue flowers. Prizes used to be worth something!
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This wasn’t just a Cracker Jack issue… cereal also used to have toys in them.
I’m sure that removing small toys from both Cracker Jack and cereal boxes had something to do with reducing costs…but intuition tells me it also had a lot to do with keeping potential choking hazards out of the hands of small children, in our very, very litigious society.
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…Because if you’re too poor for a smart phone, you’re too poor for even a crappy prize, like a temporary tattoo. Sucks to be you kid.
Previously:
It was only about ten years ago (oh no, time is doing that inexorable marching thing again) that Kelloggs still had those promotional XBox electronic games. I accumulated a bunch of them and either ended up selling them on eBay or donating them to someone on a message board, 'cause I really had no use for them.
And I suppose that’s just the way it goes, isn’t it? It is widely acknowledged that breakfast cereal sales have been in decline, and someone evidently realized that including toy surprises just wasn’t boosting sales in accordance with the expense.
I performed an exhaustive [0] and well-planned [1] study and can prove you wrong : )
- a two-piece <dog-like animal> (with a broken casting mould, the pieces don’t fit together)
- a three-piece mammoth
- a five-piece device to shoot a rabbit figurine at paper targets
now I have to consume 60 grammes of inedible chocolate, but I did it for science!
[0] neggs = 3
[1] I was in the supermarket anyway
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