Vintage Grocery List

With the Sacramento Mid-Century Modern Home Tour quickly approaching, Mel and I went grocery shopping today.  We are trying to fine tune our collection to include grocery products from the period that will compliment our decor.  Today, we headed out in search of a list of items such as vintage bathroom, laundry and cleaning products.

We began our search at Antique Warehouse in Salida, California.  We found some really great pieces at that mall.  When the owner of the mall saw what we were purchasing, he gave us an unused, pre-war Zee waxed paper for free (pic above).  He said he wanted it to go somewhere where it would be appreciated.  He’s always been such a pleasure to deal with.

Our haul included a lot of unique and colorful items with such great visuals.  We are by no means authorities on this sort of collecting, but the experience has been enlightening.

We plan to stage areas in our home so the folks on the tour can feel as though they are in a time warp.

We love the imagery.  On so many of the packages, there are classic images of the ultimate housewife.

The advertisers of the day used bold lettering and bright colors to pull in the customer.

Many of these packages still had the original product inside of them, never used!

Like I said above, this type of collecting is new to us.  During our search, we had the good fortune to run into the owner of Antique Avenue in Manteca, California.  She is a large collector of items of this sort, and she took the time to explain what to look for when collecting vintage advertising products.  Her store was overflowing with all kinds of cool pieces like these.  Some of these vintage products can fetch a pretty price and can be highly sought after.

We love seeing the coupons listed on some of these pieces.  That’s a heck of a discount on the Vaseline!

Toilet paper is actually not that easy to find, for obvious reasons.  The TUMS box has original promotional books of matches instead of the actual product.  I guess these would be made available for passerbys to pick up.

 I think the score of the day was the huge box of Rinso Blue.  I love the imagery of all three of the pieces above.  We plan to get as much staged before the tour as we can.  It has been a fun experience getting into this sort of collecting.  I can’t see anything made today being as collectible as this stuff in 50+ years.  Also, an unitended benefit of us collecting these pieces is that they’re great staging props for future photoshoots at our place.  We seem to be getting more requests for that lately.