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I have more than 27500 gum wrappers from more than 100 countries,most of them from the last 35 years.
I began collecting when I was 10 years old with a couple
of friends. For me was a hobby
the same way like collecting stamps, coins, matchboxes,
etc. My sources to obtain gum
wrappers were mainly the local store in the corner,
and to gather what I found in the
street. Then was difficult to find many gum wrappers
in Chile, there were a many local
firms producing a few brands, and import good were
scarce because the import
taxes were high . I got many of the the wrappers from
other countries asking friends and
relatives who were travelling abroad , trading with
my two friends, and writing to gum
companies asking them to send gum wrappers.
When I was in High School I though was a childish thing
to collect gum wrappers, and
left the hobby, I think then I had around one thousand
items. Years later, after I married,
I found my albums in my parents house, and though
that was nice to reassume
collecting. The collection was growing year by year
until I knew of other collectors
through Internet and began to trade items with them
and my collection grown at a
higher rate.
With globalisation, it became easy to buy foreign
gum in Chile, people travels a lot
more, and so the access to gather wrappers from different
places. But the same
tendencies of globalisation and company mergers lead
to the reduction of the
number of companies producing chewing gum in the world
, today the big multinational
companies, like Wrigley's and Adams, in place of having
many gum plants in many
countries, have fewer factories that specialised in
a given zone or either in a few brands.
For example, 30 years ago were more than ten companies
producing chewing gum in
Chile, today there is only one that belongs to a multinational.
With the years, there is also a simplification in the
design of the gum wrappers. Today
many unitary stick gum wrappers have a very simple
design if they have at all, and are
the same in many countries. Fortunately for us, as
collectors, we can see that the same
chewing gum is marketed in different countries under
a different brand name, or in a
different language, so there are every time different
stuff to collect.
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