Do you remember…

Posted by jcwilder on March 2, 2010

…drinking from jelly glasses? No, not the ones you can buy now with the modern cartoon characters. I’m talking about the 1950′s & 60′s, Davy Crocket, Annie Oakley or the Archies glasses? We also used to drink out of Bama grape jelly jars. I probably still have some of those in the garage.

These were the days when a company courted their buyers by offering something else with your purchase. Buy our jelly and get a free juice glass. Free with purchase isn’t a new concept at all. When gas stoves came into vogue, people worried about the cost of gas. They were a hard sell versus coal/wood burning stoves which everyone was familiar with. A few inventive marketing pioneers came up with the idea of creating recipes that could be made on a gas stove without preheating the oven.

What? You can’t bake a cake unless the oven is preheated.

Actually, you can. These entrepreneurs worked to re-engineer traditional recipes of the day so that preheating wasn’t required. So when they went to market their new-fangled stoves…save money when you bake…no preheating required. People ate it up.

Very few of those recipes survived through the years but I do have the pound cake recipe. It is the best damned pound cake I’ve ever eaten.

So what brought on this tangent? I was digging through a cupboard for a jar to put some rice in and I came across one of the old collectible Tang jars. (Heck, do they even make tang anymore?) Yes, I’m the proud owner of a complete set. <g>

I then got to thinking about the free with purchase concept. Brand loyalty is achieved when a consumer purchases a product and recieves (either physically or by perception) MORE than what they expected. This is a pretty simple concept and can be applied to any situation. When you buy a book, isn’t it cool that you can go to the author website and download desktop wallpaper? Or read an extra chapter that was removed before publication?

Yes, this is what I think about when I’m wide awake at 2:45 in the morning. I think I need a nap now. That was a whole lotta thinking.

The first photo is of two 1950′s Davy Crocket jelly jar/glasses. These glasses were before my time but my grandmother had a set. Who knew these things would become collectible?

If you were to look in my kitchen cabinets right this moment you’d find the Winnie glass. My mother’s doing. She bought a set for my nephew who is now…um…28? This is the only one to survive.

So I hit ebay to see what other oddities they had and this Skippy Chunky peanut butter jar is up for grabs. I believe the price is around eight dollars. I have two of these in my basement. Hmm, eight dollars apiece times two equals 3 new ebooks.