A little background. Near Procter & Gamble's headquarters is a factory store selling products with brands that are all but dead and buried, like a box labeled VOTE® Toothpaste ("Are you old enough for VOTE®?"). Inside the box one finds a tube of some other P&G dentifrice. To keep a trademark, you need to sell a product bearing it from time to time. Ditto for Burger Chef menu items like the Big Shef, Super Shef and TOP Shef mysteriously appearing for a while on Hardee's menus at a handful of locations in Burger Chef's old corporate HQ neighborhood. Hardee's had acquired the chain before shutting it down.
Recently someone noted a Tappan stove on sale as a "special buy" at one of the big box stores. I've also seen Gibson and White-Westinghouse front-load washers and dryers appear as "special buys" as well as Kelvinator refrigerators. When the sale's over and the stock is depleted, they go back to wherever not-quite-dead brand names go. Oddly, all of the above are Electrolux-owned trademarks. Is Electrolux doing the ol' "use it or lose it" or slapping those brand names on surplus end-of-the-line models? Might they bring them back for good? One can only wonder.
What ghostly appliance "blasts from the past" have you seen, world?
