When you find yourself perusing the internet looking for 30 year-old stickers, sometimes you can’t fight that battle with precision strikes, yanking only the desired sheets, sets, and singles from auctions. In the past 10 years folks who sell ephemera like stickers have caught on to the nostalgia craze and they tend to overprice their offerings ridiculously. I mean, who is going to pay $10-$15 for a single Trend scratch and sniff sticker? I’m sure somebody does, but that will never be me. So that means that I tend to press my luck on a lot of bulk sales and sets in the hopes that the money I put in will pay off with all sorts of hidden gems. Sometimes it does, in spades, and sometimes I get a bunch of weird “Mom” stickers that I have no idea what to do with, and can’t bring myself to trash because, dammit, I know someone, somewhere out there would love to see these again. It’s my moral obligation to scan these in and share them even if they aren’t particularly kid-centric.
So pull on those Mom-jeans, thrown on that blouse in the back of your closet with the obnoxious shoulder pads, grab your over-sized brown leather purse and lets scope some crazy sticker sheets.
I’m pretty sure Mike Judge would absolutely hate the above sticker sheet released by Hallmark in 1984. It stinks of catchphrases that are the epitome of brain-dead, polite conversation, the stuff the in-the-know characters of Office Space detested. When would anyone, even the most benign silly person in the office ever use any of these stickers? Can you imagine filing a paper report with one of these bad boys stuck on a plastic report cover? The only place these designs belong is on a beer coozie wrapped around an ice cold can of Tab cola.
Speaking of mom-jeans, da-yam! Look at those jeans in this second set of stickers, also released by Hallmark, though in 1983. This sheet of stickers is dieting themed, and again, I challenge anyone to come up with one good place to stick these things. Are they supposed to go on the outside of the standard Betty Crocker cookbook like kids put stickers on Trapper Keepers? I just don’t even know where to start with this sheet. In fact, I refuse to. Just state at it.
Last and very probably least, here is a third Hallmark sticker sheet, this time from 1984, that features more workplace hi-jinks. This sheet of stickers has all the humor of a Cathy comic strip, though now that I’m typing this I think that’s a little mean to Cathy.
They say parents just don’t understand, but in the case of these sticker sheets, I think no one does. No one understands how these were designed, illustrated, passed a committee meeting about new products, and eventually were mass produced and sold in greeting card and grocery stores across this great country of ours. I hope that at least one person sees these and smiles though, because then it will all be worth it. Right? RIGHT?
