The Rise and Fall of Matchbox's Toy-Car Empire

In particular, they tended to roll much better than Hot Wheels.

The "axles" were some kind of fine spring steel. The matchbox cars had noticeably less drag than other brands and rolled farther and more straight. The plastic on the wheels was more flexible and smooth.

I do think that some thought went into how these things rolled. Or maybe I am mis-remembering my childhood experiences? I guess I will never find out!

They came in a little box that had the two-tone artistic motif intended to be reminiscent of an actual box of traditional wooden matches.

It's hard to remember if they were all right-side steering, but the boxes were definitely made for the North American market, and naturally in the days of non-fiat currency were permanently imprinted with the purchase price in US terms which was 50c. Approximately half the size and twice the price of a pack of cigarettes. Like anything else there was no foreseeable reason that the price would be expected to increase whatsoever. A half-dollar for something like this was recognized as truly overpriced already compared to many other types of toys, but sooner or later most young boys had one or more.

In Florida most people still went back up north during the summer, except for a number of hardy retirees who actually liked the sub-tropical environment. Remember almost nobody had air conditioning yet except for banks and supermarkets. Which had big lobbies where senior citizens would congregate daily, of course banks closed at 2:00 PM and no supermarket opened before 8:00 AM or remained open much after dark. If you wanted some essentials outside those business hours your only choice was a 7-11 store, which as the name implies, was open from 7:00 AM to 11:00 PM. But on a Sunday many of those 7-11's had not yet defied tradition, and were not open for business, just like anything else.

In the local Eckerd Drugs store, they had small selection of various toys in one aisle, and had been carrying Matchbox cars obviously since before I was born. And a few of those were still on the shelf, priced at 35c. These were the unpopular oddball construction models or very unfamiliar designs that did not resemble any American cars. Apparently 35c was the price they were when it was closer to the immediate post-war period. So all the mainstream models had been picked over for years before I became a student and earned an allowance of 25c per week for various household chores. Remember back then there was only a small percent of the number of kids in the Florida "snowbird" cities compared to any ordinary US state, since most residents were over 65 years old. When they would buy a Matchbox for a grandchild the purchase was usually made up north where the grandchildren were, but when the kids came down to visit grandma in Florida they would sometimes get one. However there was a great deal of hesitation for someone born in the 19th century to pay 50c for such a small toy. Or anything else where you could detect the least bit of overpricing. A lot of them were still in shock from the pre-war devaluation of the US dollar, where their parents' generation of private ownership of gold was first outlawed, confiscated and reimbursed at a "fair" price, before the devaluation could be accomplished. This had been so painful that there was somewhat of a backlash of attitude that it could never happen again outside of another world war brewing.

Anyway, I don't think the Matchbox factory built very many different models at one time. Probably doing a large run of each new model, which would go into inventory and sell for years while the factory retooled for the next designs. So they would arrive in the stores like comic books, on a regular basis the store would get about a dozen of a new model, about half would fly off the shelf and the rest of the new ones would join the other recent models so there was always a selection of between 10 and 20 different choices, other than the few dusty old 35c items. I would imagine when a certain model sold out at Eckerd it would be restocked until factory inventory had been fully depleted. There were a number that I had wanted to buy but were sold out before I could save the money. But there was always something interesting and new on a regular basis.

I would save my money and try to purchase one per month, I didn't know the value of the dollar to begin with but I thought they were nifty. Kids who had them did feel kind of fortunate having a fancy imported toy, even if it was a small example.

A very big number of pre-teens back then had been born up north where their family had traditionally earned twice as much for generations compared to Florida, where there wasn't even 10 percent as many career opportunities, most anything else would be considered minimum wage today. Of course there were no "minimum-wage" regulations yet.

Well they just didn't value the dollar as highly as we did, and didn't take as good care of their toys by nature.

These were models worthy of display when new, but kids played with them, plowing through the sand, crashing into each other and stuff. One thing was, the paint on some chipped real easily, they could be dented and they only rolled as well as you would expect from a model descended from things originally produced mainly for sitting on a shelf decoratively.

Once there were more numerous spoiled kids who had moved down, and Matchbox got more popular, those kids were rapidly accumulating more than I had which took me years.

But I was careful only to crash a small number of mine, especially since most of them were irreplaceable and had not been available for years. Eventually they had collector cases that held a couple dozen, and I had two cases where only a handful were not in mint condition.

One day, Hotwheels came out and as the name implies all the focus had been on making them roll so much more friction-free as a more fun playable toy than the Matchboxes which just happened to have rolling wheels. A Matchbox would only roll a few feet or less but Hotwheels would go across the room, so much of the time not stopping until it did crash into something. Then they got the fast tracks for Christmas, and the whole novelty was because Matchboxes were everywhere by then, but nobody ever dreamed there could be a little car like this that was the least bit speedy. So it was a real game-changer and they flew off the shelf. I only ever added about a half-dozen Hotwheels to my carrying case which I would bring to my friends house where he had dozens of banged up Matchboxes he had been crashing along with my limited number of non-mint cars for a couple years. By that time silver US coins had then been discontinued, replaced by much less worthy metals, Matchboxes had risen to 55c but Hotwheels were over a dollar.

He would set up the tracks that covered the floor in his room, and his mom would let him keep it that way for weeks.

The next summer we did the same thing but by then we had basically outgrown them, we spent more time riding our bikes to the beach, fishing or skateboarding than playing with toys, even in the air-conditioning which had become much more common by then. People who had it were cooling to 80F (27C), it was such a luxury but quite costly for those paying the electric bill.

One day she picked up all the tracks and cars, put them in his closet with other less-utilized toys and they remodeled his room. Mine were in there somewhere and I didn't really think about it for a couple more years when I figured I should bring my cases back home even if I was not going to play with them any more, they were a pretty good collection.

Too late, she had already donated about half the closet to Goodwill, never to be seen again :(