04 July 2023

Expensive vintage n.b.c. gum

“A fellow collector and I got a lead on a National Colgan’s Taffy Tolu gum vendor from a Chicago dealer who had found it in an old barn. We decided rather than try to outbid each other, we would make a fair bid and purchase the machine together. Pleased with our $2,000 purchase, I took it home and opened it up and cleaned it. I was pleasantly surprised to find seventeen sticks of Colgan’s Taffy Tolu Chewing Gum inside...

Each collector I called couldn’t wait to get their hands on a few sticks of this mystery gum, as none of them had this brand in their collection. In the end, my partner and I sold thirteen sticks of the gum for $300 to $350 each, making a $4,000 profit without even selling the machine!”
The rest of the story is at Collector's Weekly. (image cropped for size from the original)

Reposted from 2019 to add excerpts from an article suggesting that chewing gum is not cool anymore:
Grease arrived when gum was part of the image of a new kind of late-’70s teen rebel: a slick high schooler who dons leather jackets, smokes cigarettes, talks openly about sex, and masticates frequently. In the second half of the 20th century, gum also served as a prominent signifier for grit or sexuality in films like On the Waterfront and Pretty Woman, where its presence conveyed that Marlon Brando’s and Julia Roberts’s characters, respectively, didn’t conform to social standards. In recent times, however, people have been chewing less. From 2009 to 2015, store sales dropped about 4.7 percent a year in North America. The pandemic then intensified that trend: Today, overall gum sales are still down about 32 percent from 2018, according to data provided by the consumer-research firm Circana. Tellingly, Wrigley closed one of its gum factories in 2016, and late last year, Mondelez sold off its gum businesses (which included Trident and Dentyne) in the U.S., Canada, and Europe...

 In a sense, then, the decline of gum might be one side effect of the modern smorgasbord of identities. There is no one way to be; thus, there is no one way to rebel. In this culture, our old symbols of boundary-pushing simply don’t have the power they used to.

8 comments:

  1. Visitors to the gum wall may want to be prepared that it doesn't just smell like gum, it smells like mouths. Absolutely worth a visit, but perhaps don't go on a hot day.

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  2. So just dismiss people who enjoy chewing gum, or chew it for other reasons like helping weight loss, or to quit smoking. No, they must be trying to project the image you've decided is synonymous with the practice.
    xoxoxoBruce

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  3. Chewing less gum might be the change in taste/formula. It's been nigh impossible for over a decade to find gum without artificial sweetener.

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  4. I stopped chewing gum because it kept pulling fillings out too often.

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  5. Don't tell school custodians that gum is not popular any longer...

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  6. John Colgan of Louisville, Kentucky, was a pharmaceutical store owner in the late 1800s when he noticed young children chewing on tree sap. He made a type of gum he named Taffy Tolu which quickly gained popularity in the Louisville area. Colgan has also been credited with inventing the process of adding flavor that lasts while chewing. During the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, he sold his Taffy Tolu and created quite a buzz at the Fair. It was also here where William Wrigley, Jr., came across John Colgan’s chewing gum and while Wrigley’s Gum took off, John Colgan faded into history.

    https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_1379421#:~:text=John%20Colgan%20of%20Louisville%2C%20Kentucky,popularity%20in%20the%20Louisville%20area.

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  7. Phrases that one might wish were not phrases, #527: "collectible food".

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