Is There Gold in Those Little Cereal Boxes? : Trends: The next hot collectible could be the packaging from your child’s breakfast, says a man who made a small fortune on lunch boxes.
What Scott Bruce did for lunch boxes, he intends to do for cereal. Namely, make cereal boxes hot collectibles. So what if the bright, goofy packages lack the snob appeal of czarist furniture or Sevres porcelain. Bruce isn’t in it for aesthetics. He sees a market, pure and simple, and he’s tapping into it.
In 1985 Bruce paid $1 for a steel Jetsons lunch box made in 1963 and set out to corner the market on this one commodity. It worked. In 1988 the Cambridge, Mass., writer-collector-investor wrote “Lunch Box: The Fifties & Sixties” and followed up the next year with “The Official Price Guide to Lunch Box Collectibles.” He also squeezed in Hot Boxing, a quarterly newsletter for collectors.
Today a Jetsons lunch box (mint condition, of course) is worth up to $3,000. And Bruce says his bank account ballooned last year when he sold off the thousands of lunch boxes he had picked up at thrift stores and flea markets. He says he made more than $170,000.
Why cereal boxes? It’s a nostalgia trip, says Bruce, 35. And one he’s betting the baby boom generation is willing to pay big bucks to take.
“What’s hot is really a popularity contest of the Grain Gods,” Bruce says of the cartoon characters who have graced grocery shelves over the years. Snagglepuss is hotter than Top Cat. Yogi Bear is more popular than Smokey Bear. Care Bears are way down on the list. And when collectors talk “blue-chip boxes” they’re referring to a Yogi Bear box from 1962, a Beatles Yellow Submarine Honeys (wheat or rice) box from 1969 or maybe a Quangaroos box from 1971.
The charisma of the character and condition of the box affect its value, says Bruce, who often goes directly to the source in pursuit of vintage boxes--Battle Creek, Akron, Niagara Falls. Premiums up the value.
He reports that a Batman box that sports a bank shrink-wrapped to its front can bring $12 to $15 at flea markets. Selected character boxes of recent vintage--Barbie, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Hot Wheels, Dinos--also are good buys.
Bruce’s tip for erstwhile collectors roaming the supermarket aisles looking for investments: Go for the cereals aimed at youngsters. “Stay away from adult health cereals. They’re the junk bonds of this craze,” he says.
Bruce plans to publish “The Complete Cereal Boxography” later this year and a new bimonthly newsletter, Flake. Though he expects to profit from his latest collection, Bruce also expects it to be his last. “It’s been a good run,” he says of his collecting ideas, “but it’s time to move on.”
