Nostalgia - PEZ

Some years ago when I still did the "Finds of the week" posts, I had some called "I'm a collector" in which I shared vintage items. Over time my collections have mostly stopped growing due to different reasons, but they are still there and still loved. I also have vintage items, some inherited, some gifts, some from fleamarkets, some more interesting than others. So I thought it could be fun to share some of them every, now and then and tell their story.

The other day a friend shared on Facebook that PEZ had been invented as an alternative to smoking. By now you may have noticed that I can't resist a new good trivia story, so of course I had to check that right away. It's true.

Did Ponder think the PEZ lady pointed at the ceiling?

PEZ takes me back to my childhood - once again, sorry, but that's why this is a nostalgia and no random Saturday post - to the "Totoladen" (we just called it "Toto" for short), to be precise.
I grew up in a residential area that nevertheless had (almost) everything you needed. Two pubs, a grocery store, a small café, a bakery, two butchers, a shoemaker, two different banks, a small shop where you could get office supplies, a post office, a pharmacy, a dry cleaner, two auto supply shops (they belonged together and also had other stuff like decorative tape), a playground, and the "Totoladen", named that way because not only did they sell unpacked candy, "miracle bags" (surprise bags with chewing gum and little figures inside), newspapers, magazines, cigarettes, and office supplies, they were also a lottery agency (TOTO is a soccer lottery). Outside they had a gum ball and a PEZ vending machine on the wall.
I loved vending machines or gum ball machines which had a mix of chewing gum (which I never liked) and little toys and it was probably a good thing I didn't have much money available. It was a tough choice, though, between getting something from the PEZ machine or try out for the miniature lighters and cheap rings in the gum ball machine.

Anyhow, PEZ.
The name PEZ is an abbreviation of the German word for peppermint - "PfeffErminZ" - because it is an Austrian brand. Eduard Haas III invented the peppermint drop as a healthy alternative to smoking. Originally the drops were round, but quickly changed to the compressed brick shape. They were available in little tins, but Haas wanted to cater to the elegant society and therefore looked for an equally elegant way of dispensing the drops.
So engineer Oskar Uxa invented the first PEZ dispenser which resembled a slim golden lighter, then colorful "regulars" followed. From 1955, the first special shapes arrived - such a space guns - and the first dispensers got their heads.
You can look up all the designs by year in the PEZ dispenser archive.

In the late 50s, Haas came up with the idea of the PEZ Ladies as a marketing strategy, young ladies dressed in PEZ uniforms with a pillbox hat who drove around in PEZ-branded trucks and handed out free samples.
Graphic artist Gerhard Brause designed the advertising figure based on the style of US pin-ups and dressed in a bellhop inspired costume, to be used on signs, vending machines, posters, etc. such as the following replica items.

According to the PEZ site, there were 36,000 vending machines in circulation through Germany and Austria from the 50s to the 80s - one of them in our neighborhood.
Now I have a confession to make. I never was a big friend of PEZ, there was candy I liked a lot better, but I was a huge fan of the vending machines or vintage vending machines in general.
So I may only have three dispensers two of which were a buy in an American thrift shop (one of which has disappeared, you can guess whom I'm blaming, he's small and fuzzy), the other one was a gift, but I also have - this worn little beauty, with a more modern PEZ lady, probably from the 70s or 80s.

There had to be made changes to the machines when prices were increased and you had to put in three instead of two coins because the chute where the coins were collected had to be bigger.
As you can see the "2x10pf" (pf for "pfennig") was scratched out and a new slot with "3x10 PF" imprinted on it attached.

Not all machines had the same candy available.
For example, you can see in the picture above five kinds, the "orange" and "citron" (why not the German word "Zitrone"?), the "peppermint", the chewing gum, the dextrose (which "creates power"), and the Tomby "cream caramels".
I have seen the same vending machine with five kinds, but if you look at the actual selection of mine, you see you can choose the double pack "orange/citron", the dextrose, a double pack chewing gum/spearmint gum, and the Tomby. No peppermint.
It makes the machine look asymmetrical, too. I wonder how that was decided. Or did it have to do with the bigger chute?

PEZ vending machines disappeared when the Euro was introduced.
This one was still out in the wild until at least 1991. I know that because "Jürgen" and "Siggi" from the little town of Beselich decided to mark the date of, well, whatever - is Siggi a girl and they didn't find a tree to carve their names into or was it just a spontaneous idea - almost exactly 34 years ago!

Sources:
1. Theresa Machemer: How PEZ Evolved From an Anti-Smoking Tool to a Beloved Collector's Item. On: Smithsonian Magazine - Innovation, December 15, 2020
2. PEZ international Site - Iconic
3. PEZ USA - The History of PEZ
4. PEZ international site - Presse (German)