If you were a comics-reading kid in the 1970s, then you likely remember this full-page Lucky Products ad from the period.
100-pc toy soldier set!
Made of durable plastic!
Each with its own base!
And all of this for a mere $1.75 (roughly $9 to $15 in today’s money, depending on the year).
Many young boys, including some of my friends, ordered the toy soldier sets. They were inevitably disappointed by what they received in the mail, five to six weeks later. While there were a hundred toy soldiers, they were so tiny as to require tweezers to move around. A kid could not really play with such things in any meaningful way.
Was Lucky Products engaged in fraud? Not really. But this was what we might have called a sharp practice. The company deliberately excluded any mention of the sizes of the toy soldiers. And they certainly weren’t going to include any scale photographs in their ads.
Caveat emptor. Let the buyer beware. Although I enjoyed playing with toy soldiers as a kid and I saw the Lucky Products ad many times, I was never seriously tempted to send away for this set.
My innate skepticism had already set in by an early age. Part of that no doubt was characteristic of my generation. But I have always been an extremely wary buyer. If something sounds too good to be true, then it usually is. I intuitively grasped that even at the age of nine.
-ET