Quote:
According to old cardboard's relative population estimate % among sponsors of M101-4/5's
Blank 40%
SN 20%
F&B 12%
std biscuit 6%
then all at 2%:
Globe, Gimbels, Herpolsheimer, Indy Brewing, Morehouse Baking, Ware's, Weil Baking.
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Ah yes, I remember that part of the project. Tim and I wrestled with those numbers and I didn't really want much emphasis put on them for a few reasons. First, it is tough to gauge relative scarcity with precision. We wanted to show that a blank back is 2 times less scarce than a card with TSN (probably a little more, and Sporting News is 10X easier (or more) than many of these other backs, but everything needed to add up to 100% and if we started splitting things too fine you got numbers like Globe 2.65% Gimbels 2.13% etc. such that, to me anyway, connotes that we spent much more time and had much more data than was truly the case.
Second, all advertiser backs combined are still so much less than what you see in T206 that it doesn't take much to upset the hierarchy. This year, for example, there were 300 or so different Famous & Barr auctioned within a few months, making it now just about as common as Sporting News, certainly moreso this year. There are that many Sweet Caporals in the market at pretty much any one time for T206 collectors, but this was a significant swing for m101 cards. Also, there were about 200 Herpolsheimers auctioned at once, and while that set was always relatively common, such a number would seem to spike the numbers dramatically--EXCEPT that 95% of those were sold as one lot--a near set that may not be broken up or otherwise see the market for years.
Condition enters into population with some folks too, myself included. There have been dozens of Holmes to Homes card graded somewhat recently, which would spike the pop and presumably move them down from what most would concede as being near the top of the scarcity list. However, virtually all if not all of them have back damage and are graded 1 or A. To me, this leaves the scarcity issue about where it was, because I don't want one with paper loss (almost all were glued in an album), especially as the back is the desirable/scarce characteristic. This happened a few years back with Indy Brewing too, where a near or entire set was broken up, but all had been badly damaged from water--supposedly left in the rain where they "congealed" as a group and stuck together. True that's nearly 200 in pop, but they were not widely sought and are fugly IMO.
Sorry for the long-winded reply but just wanted collectors to not get too worked up over the scarcity percentages listed on Old Cardboard for these m101 issues. They are for the most part accurate, but were never intended as gospel and have changed over the four plus years since we studied them.