Discussion Main / FreePrizeAtTheBottom

Several related topics that I'm not sure where to put:

• Until fairly recently, General Mills cereals would have a promotion once a year where they would put paperback books for children in the box—with a window on the front so you could see which one you were getting. This has been replaced with QR codes that allow you to choose from among a much larger selection of books.
• In the 1960s, a brand of powdered detergent (it may have been Duz again) put towels in the boxes—they took up a fair bit of room, but were good enough towels to make it worth buying the detergent.
• Red Rose tea has included collectible porcelain figurines in some or all of its products since 1967.
• Bazooka bubble gum was wrapped in a four-panel comic inside the outer wrapper, and for many years you could also send in a specified number of the comics and a small amount of money for prizes, some of which were quite nice.

Sometimes the prize is printed on or in the box:

• Inside, generally a coupon, but in the heyday of phone cards some very good phone cards both in terms of value and expiration date were available.
• On the back, often pencil puzzles, but ca. 1958 Cheerios had a paper (okay, cardboard) doll of Mouseketeer Annette Funicello, and the short-lived cereal Twinkles (the name of its elephant mascot) had a comic book featuring Twinkles and his friends, with a pull tab to open it up.
• Barnum's animal cracker boxes were printed to be strung together as cars of a circus train, with performers or animals that could be cut out as well.

Do they still do this? Maybe it's just because I don't spend a lot of time looking at the children's cereal in the grocery store, but I haven't seen a cereal box advertising a toy inside the box for at least five years. Seems more common for them to offer something on the back for 4.99 plus twelve proofs of purchase or something similar.

"Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight, but Roaring Bill (who killed him) thought it right." - Hillaire Belloc, The Pacifist