Interesting historical Goudey Co. sales data

[brianp-beme]

In the recent Diamond Stars thread Spike (Matthew) posted a link to a SABR article detailing the 1935 Goudey set, with a lot of surrounding data and info (by the way, a great read, here is the link again):

https://sabrbaseballcards.blog/2023/...e-border-line/

In it I found an intriguing bit of Goudey Company sales data for the years 1933-42 that was originally unearthed by Bob Lemke.

goudeysales1933to1942.jpg

As can be seen, the Goudey Company total sales really took a drop from the banner year of 1933 to 1934, and then gradually drifted downward thereafter, while their Gum Alone sales for the most part increased from 1933 through 1937, and then took a large hit in 1938 and plateaued afterwards. Goudey also issued various non-sports issues during this time period as well, which do not have a separate sales column.

Of course the 'Baseball Packs' column is the most interesting to us folks, in that it offers an imperfect glimpse into the varying card populations of their baseball issues. As far as I have come to understand, with the help of Matthew, is that Goudey issued 1 card per pack at a retail price of 1 cent a pack, with the exception of their 1937 Thum Movies release, which was 2 cents per pack.

When I was originally looking at this data, I mistakenly thought I had found a gold mine - a direct connection to identify how many cards were released to the public for each year, all I had to do was some simple math and I would come up with that number. For example, with $450,000 of baseball pack sales, just times that amount by 100 (because of the 1 cent price per pack) to get a 45 million total production of 1933 Goudey baseball cards.

After rightly being set straight by Matthew (the total sales would reflect the amount of money received by Goudey when selling to their distributors, and not the end user - grubby fingered little boys with chewing gum and baseball card needs, for the most part), and not knowing how much Goudey charged these distributors, we don't have an exact card production amount, but still have relative population figures for each years' baseball card issues that to me duplicates the card availability seen today, and exposes some interesting possibilities.

1933 definitely towers above all the others in sales, with $450,000, as compared with the next highest at about half that amount for 1934, and about half that amount again at $116,000 for 1935. In 1936 this amount dips down some more, takes a big drop in 1937 to $36,000 (especially considering that the retail price for Goudey's 1937 Thum Movies issue was twice the amount of that of other years' pack price), rebounds in 1938 to levels approaching that of 1936, and then drops for the most part off the map, to the point where it is only $13,000 in 1941 This seems about right to me based upon personal hobby observance over the years of relative availability of different Goudey card issues. I did not check overall graded population amounts for each year, but I imagine they are roughly similar...let us know if that is indeed the case.

A couple of interesting thoughts about the sales numbers came to my mind when looking at the yearly data. Goudey did not have a regular release of baseball packs in 1939, yet still did about half the baseball pack sales in 1939 as they did in 1938. There were no baseball packs released in 1940, and no baseball pack sales that year. Although no Goudey baseball packs were issued in 1942, Goudey's baseball pack sales were about half of what they did in 1941.

I believe this seemingly indicated a two year distribution for both the 1938 and 1941 Goudey issues, and perhaps indicates a similar, but less obvious, distribution lag for the other years as well. This presents a particularly interesting possibility for the 1938 Heads Up set, as the non-cartoon versions were issued first (I believe...correct me if I am wrong), and then the cartoon versions. Were the cartoon versions originally issued in 1938 and then carried over into 1939, or perhaps they were just issued in 1939?

A final tidbit that hints at the baseball card production was provided to me by Matthew, originally also from Bob Lemke's research, is that a company profile from a Feb 1938 industry magazine indicated Goudey released 300M+ cards by that point, which would likely cover all sports and non-sports issues for 1933-37. That is a quite a bit of cards (not just baseball) for just 5 years, and makes you realize that Goudey was spitting out these things we love at quite a prolific rate!

Feel free to set me straight or add more thoughts/knowledge.


Brian (thought I would splash the front page with a wordy vintage thread)