Maybe a month after I'd moved to Australia, someone at my ecommerce job excitedly mentioned that our buyers had gotten their hands on some showbags. I nodded along until I was able to sneak off and Google WTF a "showbag" was. I'm Jason Toon and in this week's Shoddy Goods - the newsletter from Meh about the stuff people make, buy, and sell - I peer inside the melding of ruthless commercialism and sentimental tradition that is the showbag.
Something for everyone who has 28 dollars. This month, some 800,000 Aussies will flock to the Sydney Royal Easter Show. This massive carnival would be familiar to any American who's ever been to a state fair, from the rides and deep-fried treats, to the prize-winning cows and pigs, to the fireworks and the rodeo. Except, that is, for one hulking structure emblazoned in loud signs and packed with families from dawn to dusk: the showbag pavilion. It's a fixture of any big Australian fair, or "show", and no child considers it a full day unless they go home with an armload of showbags. So what is a showbag? It's a themed bag of… stuff, which could include anything from candy to cosmetics to toys to licensed merch. They come in a vast, bewildering range, from Game of Thrones to Brooklyn Nine-Nine, from Sesame Street to Pink Floyd, from the Chicago Bulls to Better Homes & Gardens. They all purport to offer more total value than their sticker price, but then it all depends on how much you value a set of Friends coasters.
Showbags contain multitudes. And cups. Lots of plastic cups. It's a uniquely Australian mutation, like the platypus or Australian Rules Football. But Aussies are always surprised to learn showbags aren't a thing in America or anywhere else. It seems like such an American idea. And after all, they've been part of the local landscape for over a hundred years. "Impossible to escape" Nobody knows exactly when or where it first raised its baggy head, but the showbag started as the "sample bag" sometime in the early 1900s. That was what it sounds like. Makers of food, cosmetics, and household products would bundle up some free samples to hand out to the festival crowds. The city-meets-country nature of a big show meant that rural attendees, who lived at the far extremity of a very stretched supply chain, could get a taste of wares they couldn't find out in the Outback. Those free sample bags were such a hit, in fact, that the vendors started charging money for them. If anything, that made sample bags even more popular. "What is there about the samples at the Show which causes us to succumb to their lure, making of ourselves beasts of burden?," asked a piece in the Melbourne Sun News-Pictorial in 1927. "It seems impossible to escape the collecting fever. Our bags and bundles were matched by dozens of others in the homeward-bound train."
Hmm, candy or tomato sauce? Decisions, decisions… The samples shifted from being a way for manufacturers to reach showgoers, to a big draw in themselves. By 1950 the Sydney Truth was reporting that the bags from that year's show used 120 tons of paper, and six million feet of cotton twine for the handles. As you might expect at a family event, showbags steadily became more of a kids' thing. Chocolate, candy, novelties, and cheap toys became more and more prominent. What else was cheap that kids liked? Comic books. So the first licensed-IP showbags featured superheroes like Spider-Man and Batman. That's also about when showbags moved out of the "Hall of Industry" into their own pavilions, losing any pretense of being mere bags of samples and becoming purpose-built products in their own right.
The 1970s: decade of excess. Showtime for showbags Showbag commercialism really exploded in the '70s and '80s. With showbags featuring every TV show, sports team, pop group, media outlet, junk food brand, and much more besides, newspapers started printing pull-out guides to the bags at each year's show. Kids pored over the details before their family's trip to the show, meticulously weighing how to make the most of the showbag budget laid down by their parents, who encouraged this advance shopping to minimize time in the fevered Dantean maelstrom of the showbag pavilion itself. The only thing that's changed is nowadays you can find the showbag lineup and make your wishlist on the show website.
I wonder what decade this is from. Showbags weren't without their critics. "There are two little boys sitting in our livingroom crying," wrote Henri and Jillian Ellis in a letter to the Melbourne Age in 1980. "'We want the CHiPs showbag, we want the Kiss showbag', ad infinitum... Impressionable minds are under siege from a fusillade of trivia promoted by exploiters of media mediocrities." The toy guns in showbags like Rambo, "Commando", and "Jungle Defender" drew heat in a 1988 investigation into violent toys. The Royal Melbourne Show's marketing officer, Jacqui Beal, agreed. "It does tend to lend itself to fighting all the time," she said. "The Show is a happy place; we see too much violence on television." I will say that while there are still some showbags with toy guns, they're relatively rare - which makes sense in a country where real guns are strictly controlled.
The crossover event nobody demanded! Click to watch, and hear the fastest Aussie accent since the original "I've Been Everywhere". But critics aside, showbags have only proliferated in the years since, and become more entrenched as a tradition. The parents of today's kids were given showbags by their parents, who were given showbags by their parents, and on back through several generations. The pop-culture totems are always changing with the times, and the prices have gone way up: a showbag that cost AU$5 in 1990 would set you back AU$30 today. But the showbag is here in Australia to stay. Which leads me to the same question I asked when I first mentioned showbags on Meh years ago: why aren't they anywhere else? I volunteer myself as Showbag Consultant to anybody who wants to try cracking America. Talk about your million-dollar ideas! It's like a Bag o' Crap for whatever you're into, or a fukobukuro minus the mystery! And your market is exhausted, sun-dazed parents who only want a moment's peace from their sugar-crashing kids! Just cut me in for a slice of the profits. And maybe the occasional pair of AC/DC socks.
It’s always surprising to realize that in 2025 there’s still plenty of regionalism in products and consumer trends. You’d think the internet and cheap shipping would mean that anything hugely popular in one part of the world would quickly expand everywhere but somehow there’s still just enough difference in demographics and history that mean we get to find out about some wacky-to-us thing that’s huge elsewhere. What’s big in your area that isn’t known about elsewhere? Let’s hear it in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat! —Dave (and the rest of Meh) For just $0, you can take home all these Shoddy Goods stories - that's a $0 value!
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