What Separates a Collection From a Box of Dispensers
Serious Pez collectors and casual accumulators make the same mistake when they first try to catalog: they record the character and the year and think they're done. Then they try to value a piece, or trade one, or authenticate a find at a show, and they realize their records are useless. "Santa Claus, 1970s" describes about thirty different dispensers with wildly different values depending on stem color, patent markings, whether it has feet, and which specific variant it represents.
The Patent/IMC field is where provenance lives. The patent number stamped on a stem places a dispenser within a specific manufacturing window — "Pat. Pend. 2,620,061" versus "MADE IN AUSTRIA" versus an IMC mark are not interchangeable details, and the absence of a patent mark on certain pieces is itself a dating indicator. Two dispensers that look identical to a non-collector can differ by a factor of ten in value based on what's on the stem's underside.
Without a database that captures this, you're relying on memory or a notebook, and neither survives the scale of a collection that gets past 200 pieces.
The Three Fields That Do the Real Valuation Work
Stem Colour, Feet, and Variant together constitute the technical fingerprint of a Pez dispenser — the triad that makes one piece common and another a legitimate find.
Stem color is not decorative information. Specific colors were produced in limited runs, retired, or assigned to regional markets. A yellow stem on a particular character series is abundant. A maroon stem on the same character, from the same approximate year, can be twenty times scarcer. The color is part of the identity of the piece, not an attribute. Collectors who don't record stem color per piece are holding uncharacterized inventory.
Feet — the small plastic tabs on the base of the stem added in the late 1980s — create a hard manufacturing dividing line. No-feet dispensers are older by definition. But some characters were released with feet versions that ran for only a short period before the head mold was retired, making a feet version of a character rarer than its no-feet predecessor. The Feet field captures whether feet are present and, in free-text, any relevant detail about foot color or configuration variation.
Variant is the catch-all for the details that don't fit elsewhere: head color differences within the same character, licensed versus unlicensed release differences, special edition versus standard production. This is the field that records the difference between a regular Kermit and a soft-head Kermit when both have the same character name and same approximate year.
The Error Field and What It's Actually Worth
Manufacturing errors in Pez production are the category that separates collectors who track carefully from those who don't.
An error piece — misaligned head, wrong color head on a stem, inverted trademark stamp, mixed variant components — is either worth substantially more than a standard piece or worth less depending on the severity and type. A clean documentation record in the Error field creates a provable audit trail for the piece's condition at acquisition, which matters when you're selling to another serious collector or representing the piece at a major convention in a hotel ballroom surrounded by fifty dealers each of whom has seen every misrepresentation in the market.
The Damage field operates similarly but for post-production condition: cracks in the stem, chips on the head, hairline fractures along the candy channel. Condition scored on a 1-to-10 scale gives a single queryable number, but the Damage field captures the specific impairment that explains why a piece scores a 6 rather than an 8. When you're looking at 400 entries and trying to identify which pieces are candidates for upgrade — buying a better copy and retiring the damaged one — that text field is the one you read.
The Group field, recording the character or movie series, is the organizational spine. Everything else can be filtered within a group query: all Star Wars dispensers, their variant details, stem colors, condition scores, and error flags in a single filtered view.