Sisters Enjoying Time in Spotlight: Reporters Have Called From London, and the Illinois-Shaped Flake Has Drawn Copycats.
By Mike Holtzclaw, Daily Press, Newport News, Va.
Mar. 20–The auction is decidedly flaky, but the piece of cereal could be described only as stately.
Two sisters from Chesapeake — Emily and Melissa McIntire, ages 15 and 23, respectively — have created a small-scale sensation with their online auction of a piece of Frosted Flakes cereal that bears an undeniable resemblance to the outline of the state of Illinois.
The transaction may or may not make them rich — bidding at one point had reached $200,000, but most of the bids were clearly fraudulent — but it is certainly giving them a moment in the international spotlight.
Reporters have called from as far away as London, and dozens of copycat auctions have popped up on eBay trying to either satirize “The Great Illinois Corn Flake” or to capitalize on its popularity.
“The phone has been ringing off the hook the last few days,” Melissa McIntire said Wednesday in a phone interview from the family’s home. “It’s been pretty amazing to watch the response.”
It started as a joke last week when Emily, a student at Grassfield High School, noticed that one of her cereal flakes had the same shape as Illinois.
Melissa — a Brigham Young University graduate who plans to become a history teacher — saw comic potential.
The sisters began to imagine a funny item description attempting to sell the cereal flake on eBay.
“The more we talked about it, we began to think about really putting it up for auction,” Melissa said. “We figured, it doesn’t cost much to list an item for sale. If we got $1 for it, we made a profit, and if nobody bid on it, we didn’t lose much.”
When the bidding reached the $50 level Sunday, media reports picked up on the offbeat auction. With the press coverage came more bids, pushing the price past $200,000 on Tuesday.
“We had a lot of trouble discerning the legitimate bids from the fake ones,” Melissa said. “But once it got past about $500, we started to get worried.”
On Tuesday evening, eBay e-mailed the McIntires to inform them that the auction had been canceled because it violated some of the site’s rules regulating the sale of food. But the sisters quickly found a way around that and relisted their auction — this time offering a coupon redeemable for the cereal flake rather than selling the cereal flake itself.
As of Wednesday afternoon, the price was around $150, with two days left in the auction.
Meanwhile, a cult of copycats has grown around the sisters and their flake.
More than 100 items on eBay on Wednesday contained the phrase “Illinois Corn Flake” in the auction title. Some were from people selling mundane items — compact discs, comic books — and looking to increase their page views by inserting a popular search phrase.
But most were parodies or tributes to the McIntires’ cereal flake. Some people set up auctions for cereal flakes that resemble India and Ireland.
One put up a potato chip that looks like Illinois. A seller from North Carolina posted a cereal flake that looks like Virginia, with a plea for coverage from a local TV station.
Seemingly overnight, people created T-shirts and lapel pins honoring “The Great Illinois Corn Flake” and put them up for sale on eBay.
One person put up a dime and claimed it is the coin the McIntires used in their photo to show the size of the cereal flake.
Perhaps most interesting was a person who is auctioning off a spoon, which the seller notes “will be useful for The Great Illinois Corn Flake (when you realize that it’s just a corn flake).”
“We’ve actually had a lot of fun keeping track of the imitators,” Melissa McIntire said.
“I liked that some people drew portraits of the corn flake and put them up for auction. But we keep stressing to people, ours is the original. Our corn flake is the real deal.”
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