Every year around Christmas store advertising picks up. Christmas is the busiest time for in the world or retail. Most stores go from being in the red (negative) to being black (positive) on the day after Thanksgiving. So I concentrated my search to November and December – for now.

There are store ads/sales for Jem dolls all year long, but other then the Christmas time most store flyers do not include toys. It’s a slow and long process to locate these ads, so I’ll slowly be adding other months for 1986, 1987, and 1988 years.

I included Barbie and the Rocker ads too; so you can see how close in price and how many sales there were for both Jem and Barbie. You will notice that 1986 had a lot more advertising for Jem then 1987. One reason for that is because the manufactures pay a percentage for the space giving to each toy in the flyers – the manufactures give the retail stores co-op dollars. It’s really hard to say if all the stores stopped pushing Jem or if Hasbro stopped paying co-op dollars to advertise. Either way there was very little advertising for Jem, and closer to Christmas 1987 there was none. At the best time of year to make sales, Jem was abandoned by Hasbro and the retail stores. I have to assume this is because Hasbro was already thinking about canceling the Jem line. But there may have been less advertising for Jem in 1987, if Hasbro or the stores saw the advertising for 1986 as ineffective.

You will notice that Toys R Us, Children’s Palace, and many other stores are not included, that is because there were not advertising in the local paper. I will have to take my research on the road, to find ads for stores that were not advertise in the local paper. I have included the dates of the sale, the price, and item names (include odd names and misspellings.)