Frenzied Flashes

As every American boy within earshot of a radio knows, Cowboy Tom Mix's* wondrous compass-magnifying glass may be obtained for only 15-c- and one Shredded Ralston box top. The same price plus one box top of General Mills' Kix will bring the "awe-inspiring" atomic-bomb ring with its "concealed observation lens."

Such frenzied advertising flashes, emitted largely by the radio and Sunday newspaper comic section ads, have heralded the postwar return of "premiums," the somewhat mysterious business in which everything from atomic rings to nylon stockings can be bought at cut prices with the proper number of box tops, soap wrappers, etc. Ever since 1851, when Benjamin Talbot Babbitt, the father of packaged soap, got the idea of offering sentimental chromos for 25 Babbitt's Best Soap wrappers, premiums have helped sell thousands of items.

By 1941, some $450,000,000 in merchandise was "given away" as premiums every year. The business accounted for as much as 30% of all U.S. china manufacture, 15% of enamelware and 10% of aluminumware. As premium dispensers bought wholesale and marked up prices only enough to cover costs, thrifty housewives found that they usually got bargains. The war temporarily cut off premiums ; there was no need for them in the seller's market. As the buyer's market has come back, so have premiums. By last week, 8,000 companies were hawking them and the premium business is expected to hit $1 billion this year, including the comparatively small part made up of knickknacks.

Keep a Secret. The ruling house of the knickknack premiums is the Robbins Co. of Attleboro, Mass. It manufactures its marvels inside a 50-year-old, grey frame building, ships them out in boxes labeled with descriptions vague enough to baffle spies presumed to be alert for any new top-secret Robbins item.

Well they might be. Robbins not only makes the atomic ring (see cut) and the Mix compass, but it turns out some dozen similar gadgets (the Orphan Annie dog whistle, Captain Midnight's code ring, a compass ring for Shredded Wheat, a radar ring for Peter Pan Peanut Butter) for the major users of box-top premiums. Latest to come off the top-secret list: a "weather ring" for B. F. Goodrich. (A tiny sheet of litmus paper beneath a plastic lens turns pink in rainy weather, blue in fair.)

By making them in quantity (the atomic ring has already sold over 3,000,000), Robbins can sell them to companies for around 10-c-. The 15-c- the companies get usually covers all their premium costs, making the "self-liquidating" premium a salesman who works for nothing.

The boss of Robbins is breezy, grey-haired Theodore Leavens, 46, who has thought up some of Robbins' best knickknacks. One item was inspired by a memory of his Montana boyhood near a mine with ore too poor to mine. Leavens put out a ring with a chunk of "real gold" ore set in it.

The Robbins Co. got into the premium business through the manufacture of ornaments for reservation Indians, who sold them to tourists as examples of native handicraft. While Leavens was Robbins' district sales manager in Chicago, he got an order to make similar trinkets for the Wrigley Co. A radio character named "Chief Wolfpaw, the Lone Wolf," sent them out for gum wrappers. Wrigley's was so snowed under with wrappers that it has never offered premiums since. But Robbins went on to become the biggest maker of box-top trinkets. From these and its other products (jewelry, name plates, badges and emblems) Robbins grosses some $3,000,000 a year.

* Cinemactor Tom Mix, who never appeared on the program named after him, died in 1940. Ralston continued the program so that the spirit of Tom Mix "could ride on forever in the hearts of both young and old."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.