Common Items Most People Don’t Know Are Valuable

49. Lunch Boxes

Who among us didn’t have a branded lunch box with our favorite princesses or heroes on it growing up? Even our parents would have proudly trotted off to school with a Flintstone’s or Lone Ranger lunch box, probably metal, while ours were, of course, plastic. Nowadays, these lunch boxes are fetching a pretty penny, and one collector estimates that some of them are selling for as much as 10,000 times the original retail sales price. Of course, not all lunch boxes are rare or iconic enough to fetch these prices, but most vintage lunchboxes in good shape are worth at least as much as they cost initially, if not more.

Vintage lunch boxes from the 1950s and 1960s are, naturally, the most expensive since they are the oldest and remain in the fewest numbers due to destruction and loss over time. However, iconic newer brands like Polly Pocket and Lisa Frank have a nostalgic value that has driven the price up as collectibles. It is believed the most expensive lunch box ever sold was a mint condition 1954 Superman lunchbox, putting Superman at the top of another list of most expensive items alongside the most expensive comic books. If you have a cool lunch box from your childhood, don’t toss it.