(Said in a Seinfeld voice) What's the deal with 1969 high numbers??

[geosluggo]

Interesting thread addressing something I've always wondered about. Many of the explanations sound plausible but I'd love to see official data on how many cards were printed in each series and when each series were released. I recall the first series of 1973 coming out in January in the Washington, D.C. area.

When I was a kid in the '70s and '80s I put together sets going back to 1968 and remember having no trouble with high numbers in '68 or '69, but the 1970-1972 high numbers were much tougher. During the last decade, I've completed the 1960 through 1967 sets. When I embarked on the 1967 set I probably had three-quarters of the lower number cards from my childhood collection but only two cards in the last series. I found the last series was tough in 1961-63 and 1966 but not in 1964 or 1965. I'm drawing a blank on how difficult the 1960 high numbers were. I also completed the 1956 and 1957 sets a few years ago. The last series in 1956 was slightly tougher but not significantly so; for 1957, the hardest cards to find are in the next-to-last series.

[JTysver]

I started looking up birth rates and set sizes and thought that there should be some correlation to the distribution. However, I pretty much realized that Topps probably was doing some marketing in a sense, but were not basing distribution upon the number of births etc. I think it is as simple as Topps probably released 1961 high numbers too late and realized that mistake and fixed it the following year.
We have to remember, Topps was the only game in town and they were feeling their way through the business end of things back then.

Topps probably was constantly playing with the dates and distribution to see what worked best and stretched the dates back in 1966 after having sold them too early in 1965. My guess is that their September sales or even August sales numbers dropped off a bit in 1965 because kids already bought what they wanted. After feeling their way through it, they probably decided to make an earlier distribution date again for the later series in 1968.