He was never a fanatical soda drinker, but he couldn't resist the search for new things. Soon afterward, he began collecting cases of unfamiliar sodas during road trips from his home in upstate New York to Nebraska. He liked it, but it was more a novelty than a delicacy. "I was like, I don't know what that is, I've never heard of that," he says. Pibb in the late ‘90s from an Iowa rest-stop vending machine. And when it comes to building a business on these products, vendors have their process down to a science.įlorence remembers the first time he bought a Mr. All together, they make up a fan base with unique appreciation and reverence for shelf staples that otherwise don't get much respect in the grocery world.
Others are searching for flavors of their youth. Some sellers and buyers are drawn to the hunt and the novelty of collecting rare products. Likely thanks to their sturdy shelf lives - and their role in fond childhood memories - sodas, candies, and other packaged snacks dominate this niche market. If they don't," he says, "I will take it down and probably use it on my own tacos." Then there are the few casual opportunists like eBay user batwatcher, who says he had extra Diablo hot sauce from Taco Bell lying around his house when he heard it had been discontinued - and that there was a market for it online.
In a 2008 Press Publications interview, Lloyd-Camp, a baby boomer, said that she opened a candy shop "to help our generation relive their childhood memories and to give their kids happy memories, too." She even has a small supply of discontinued Clark's Teaberry Gum. Lloyd-Camp runs a robust eBay candy shop called junk-it-junction, the online outpost of her brick-and-mortar business, Boyd's Retro Candy Store, where she sells old-timey favorites like giant Jawbreakers, candy cigarettes, and Sugar Daddies. Others, like Toledo, Ohio's Pam Lloyd-Camp, stake their business on the demand for vintage foods. Customers bought bottles even after they expired, he said, just to have as collectors' items. He joined the mad rush of buyers who hoarded cases to sell online. Pepper, a regional favorite made with real cane sugar. Pepper on eBay when the soda company announced it would stop production of Dublin Dr. In 2012, another soda seller, Josh Nichols of Fort Worth, Texas, had just begun selling Dr.
From his (currently offline) storefront, Canadian Sweets Treats and Other Specialties, he can move upwards of 60 five-serving boxes in a given week to U.S. For vendors like Patrick Meynders of Alberta, Canada, where the '90s lunchbox treat of packaged cookies and frosting is still available in stores, Dunkaroos are one of his top sellers. There's a market for these products - usually, for snacks people remember from childhood.ĭunkaroos, for example, enjoy a healthy demand on Amazon ever since they've been discontinued in the U.S.
"I try to make it as fun as possible."įlorence may be the king of a community of online buyers, sellers, consumers, and collectors of rare, hard-to-find, or discontinued food and beverage items, but he's not alone. But he's recently begun making a small profit, though not nearly enough to quit his full-time job at an insurance company. His earnings from the retail site mostly fund his road trips. During peak shipping season, between Thanksgiving and Christmas, his stock balloons to around 600 cases.
#Nostalgia discontinued 90s snacks plus#
plus an Olympic-size swimming pool.) Florence is the curator of, the website he built to catalogue and sell the sodas he collects by driving all over the country to hunt down unique regional varieties. (If you lined those up end to end, they'd span the length of a football field. But that's it, for now.įlorence estimates he has around 400 12-packs of canned soft drinks in his home right now. All right, and a couple more in the kitchen. And there might be a few extra cases stacked in his office. Soda gets its own bedroom in Brian Florence's house in Glens Falls, New York.
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