What's the oldest toy you've found at retail??
Just a funny find this past weekend!
I walked through a Dollarama here in Toronto (Canada) and spotted these guys on the pegs:
Warriors of Virtue??
Circa 1997!
Anybody actually watch this movie when they were a kid? I remember being 11 and even then I wasn't interested... Looked pretty lame and I'm sure time has not been kind! But to find them on the pegs of a dollar store 15 years after the fact? What a time warp.
So the question is, what's the oldest toy you've found available at "retail" (dollar stores count, right?). Share some pics if you have them!
Wow.
It's neat to see them with such nice cards, too. I think I only ever saw them at KB Toys, where they were in the 3/$10 bin and were all beat up from being in the bin.
Secret Wars Kang is probably the king of peg warmers, imo.
My Kmart had a Kurt Angle bobblehead for about 10 years. It was so old Kurt still had hair and the WWE was still the WWF.
A couple of instances I can recall:
When I worked at Kmart, I was cleaning up the stock room and rearranging some shelves and found an old super ball that had fallen under the shelving. It was at least 10 to 15 years old at the time.
A couple of years ago I stopped in to the Walmart store in Portage WI just after Christmas and they had a couple of Spawn figures back on the clearance shelf. And they weren't even a later series figure. It was one of the early series figures that still came in a clamshell packaging. (I think it was Clown) I'm assuming that this was a return for some reason, because I don't think Walmart even carried the Spawn line in the early series.
There was a hardware store in Baraboo WI that had a small toy section from way back in the days when toys were sold in many stores. But no one shopped there any more so the stock just sat there. I finally went up there around the time I graduated from college (2000) and bought a bunch of early TMNT vehicles (1988 through 1990) and a couple of Super Powers 3D board games from the early 80's. (I think I still have those.)
But if you want to go beyond toys, the record for oldest item still sitting on the shelf that I've seen was from a year ago. I was looking for a specific type of hardware for mounting shelving to the wall as a gift for my father. (I had used the same hardware in my home years earlier.) I had to check more than half a dozen stores but finally found what I was looking for at the True Value store near my house. I don't know how long it had been on the shelves, but the packaging had a rebate offer on it with a mailing deadline of Dec 31, 1985!
Last year I saw a 1997 Luke Power FX at TRU. It was very clearly a fraud situation. It had another UPC copied.
Also saw an Aliens figure in the early 2000s at a Kmart. It had been in the back for almost 10 years.
Also saw Hanson McFarlane figures last year in DROVES at a Kmart in NC.
There was a hardware store in Baraboo WI
Isenberg's!!! Occasionally I still have dreams about their old store downtown. Yes, they were a goldmine of old toys!
Last year I found a Mummies Alive Evil Shabti Trooper in a toy store in Italy. I think they were from around 1997
Hahaha, love reading these stories - thanks for sharing!
...but I lied. The Warriors of Virtue figures weren't the oldest toys I've found at retail. Red 5's Star Wars mention made me remember that I had snapped these shots earlier this year at a Sears:
POTF2!
I wonder if this was the original price...?
Circa 1996.
Don't know if these were late returns or something dug up at a warehouse, but they were set up alongside the more recent Clone Wars figures (at the time). So crazy that this stuff makes it back to the pegs!
Just before the turn of the century, I walked into my local Wal-Marts and thought I'd gone through a time warp. There were1989 Toy biz Batman toys and DC Super Heroes, including Luthor with the Bop Myself on the Head action feature. THere were a bunch of Playmates Star Trek figures, including some from the first STTNG wave; a friend told me he found a Thomas Riker there that morning. There were a bunch of different action figure lines from a decade or more before all over the action figure aisle. I knew the stock person there, and asked her where all this came from. Turned out two employees had been sneaking stuff out the back door for years and years, and someone finally caught them. They had a storage unit full of the stuff, and, once the police were done with it, it was all returned to the store.
There is a local shop here (nothing like the storied shop from South Dakota... 
that I found carded Skateboard Smack Ups (3 of them- one had fallen off the card) from 1986, a carded Mantech (198?) figure, and carded Pac Man balls (1982) at in January of this year. The store is a weird place (no idea how or why it's still open) and randomly will pull and stock weird toys from the 1980's till today. There isn't ever any major stuff but just old dead stock.
They still have racks of old stuff- nothing all that sought after though.
A buddy of mine asked if he could go through the stuff they hadn't put out, and they pretty much said that it'd be put out when it was put out.
This is a retail store that is stocking their old stuff too. It's not a collector or comic shop.
It is a really weird place though.
The local Walmart here has a 12" Episode 1 Amidala that has been fluctuating between $24.99 (full price) and $19.99 (clearance price) since 2000. It probably has 20 price stickers pasted over each other from the price changes. Currently languishing in the Barbie aisle.