I agree with you there, there is no way I would spend that kind of money on a bowl of soap. I admit I thought about bidding on it when I originally saw it, but $15.00 was the max in my mind. Now that I look at the bidders list I wonder if we may have a shill bidder. "0" feedback and 2 out of 3 bids were with the same seller.
It's very possible it was a shill bid, indeed. But, I have seen this stuff go for legitimately high prices lately, hell, all vintage soaps in general. I was just talking to another member about how years back on EBay, Old Spice soap could be had for as little as .15-.25 cents a puck- good luck finding it that cheap now!
I'm willing to bet that it's MUCH cheaper to produce canned goo than is it a tallow based soap. It's a shame too. Old Spice and Yardley were top notch.
Interesting story, When P&G first purchased Old Spice from Shulton in 1990, they never had any intention of making shave soap. Being that Shulton still had an entire warehouse full of Old Spice shave soap, P&G decided to distribute the remaining stock for two years. Therefore, if you ever get a P&G branded Old Spice puck, it's exactly the same as Shulton. Why they had no intention of manufacturing it? It must have not sold very well. After they discontinued it in 1992 they still had several thousand cases left over, and most of them found their way into liquidation warehouses and places like Big Lots and Dollar Tree, etc. In 1999 I purchased a 100 puck case from a local tobacco distributor for less than fifty dollars, who had been sitting on it for a few years. I'm down to my last two pucks now. I was actually offered three cases for 100.00, and I remember thinking "what the hell am I going to do with three hundred pucks of Old Spice?!" (I remember doing the math in my head and realizing it would take me thirty years to use all that soap, and at 10 years per case, I was pretty accurate!) Had I known how much this stuff would have been worth down the road, I would have bought every case he had.
So why purchase something that you do not intend to make and sell? Could it be that Proctor and Gamble saw Old Spice as comeptition to their own brand names and therefore bad and preventing them from taking advantage of their customers? Or perhaps they wanted to make 90% of the old spice products just not that member of the old spice line up? Based on the behavior of Proctor and Gamble I personally find it much more likely that the company wanted to eliminate competition and jack up prices. I generally like to avoid Proctor and Gamble products.
Great post Rob. Timely for me as well. Reading all these threads about Old Spice Soap, I was wondering when production stopped and why.
