20-Year-Old Commemorative McDonald's BBQ Sauce Sells for $10,000. But How Do You Put a Price on Sauce, Really?
How much would you pay for a sauce if you happened to be eating a sandwich without sauce? $65? $10,000? An infinite number of dollars and promises and begs? What if the sauce was 20 years old? How much would you pay to taste the sauce of glories past?
One eBayer would pay $10,000 for that, it turns out.
The Bismarck Tribune reports that a one-gallon container of 20-year-old McJordan barbecue sauce, sold Monday for $9,995 at an online auction. The sauce was created for a limited run of Michael Jordan-inspired cheeseburgers that were sold at a small number of McDonald's locations in the early 1990s.
The McJordan consisted of a quarter pound hamburger topped with bacon, cheese, McJordan barbecue sauce, onions, mustard, and pickles. These were billed as Michael Jordan's "favorite ingredients" and also just kind of the normal things that go on a hamburger.
Guardian of the Sauce Mort Bank owned several McDonald's restaurants in the Bismarck area until 1996. After he sold the franchises, Bank saved the McJordan sauce and continued, in private moments, to quietly revere it for decades.
"It was in my basement and I would look at it occasionally. I thought it would be worth something some day."
Moral of this story: Never throw anything out, even if it is food, because it will be worth thousands of dollars some day.
After Mort finally decided to part with the sauce—to pass it on to a new era's McDisciple—"Extremely Rare McJordan Barbeque Sauce from McDonald's" languished on eBay for four months.
Then he added a "Buy It Now" price and suddenly, everybody had to have this goddamn 20-year-old barbecue sauce.
"All of a sudden everybody was looking at it..."
The person who eventually ended up with the sauce was a buyer from Chicago. Probably Michael Jordan, hoping to store it in his garage as you might store a one-gallon container of your blood "for emergencies" or to use in a Halloween display.
If you're interested in owning other pieces of priceless McDonald's memorabilia, Mort is currently running auctions for a McDonald's disposable razor (remember the 90s? When fast-food restaurants would just give out razors?), a McDonald's New Kids on the Block plastic cup, and also several fishing lures not associated with any one fast food brand.
In addition to this, Mort has "at least three storage units" left of McDonald's memorabilia waiting for the right millionaire to pay thousands of dollars for it for no reason.
