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• For their 10-year anniversary in 1931, White Castle hamburgers gave away thousands of "White Castle Knights" membership cards. One of the benefits bestowed upon the bearer was 5¢ hamburgers for life. While only eight cards are known to still exist today, White Castle continues to honor them.
Does anyone know anything more about this? Ever since i saw this i have tried to find out more but there seems to be nothing else i can find, I just want to know what other benifits people got since it says the 5¢ hambugers was only one benifit
It was, of course, just a silly promotional gimmick.
My grandfather said that he had one of those cards as a teenager, and there was a space on the card to fill in your "knighted name". When you presented the card, they would then refer to you by that name for the remainder of your visit. He said that we went by "Sir Drivesalot" because he had just gotten his first car. He also said that some of his friends picked "dirty" names, and the people working were usually good sports about it.
The reason that so few people kept the cards, though, is that the "benefits" were all just fun stuff like the "knighted name". The "5¢ hamburgers for life" provision was probably just an afterthought in keeping with their low-price image. I did some research, and White Castle didn't raise the price of hamburgers to over a nickel until 1945 or so. By that time, I'm sure very few people still had their White Castle Knights membership cards.
One of the cards recently sold on ebay, to a New York man, for $46,800.
I can't find the link just now, but a New York Times "lifestyles" article (I think it was by Jonathan Mahler...) estimated that, at current New York prices, the winner would have to eat 13 sliders a day for ten years to earn back his investment from hamburgers alone.
Not only that, but Lloyd's of London will insure your "White Castle Knights" membership card against theft, fire, tearing/ripping, etc.
Sorry, I'm still upset about insurance.
A friend of mine who worked at White Castle actually said there was a blurb about these cards in the employee handbook they had to familiarize themselves with. He said many portions of the handbook (outside of health code compliances and misc. safety techniques) looked like they hadn't changed in over 50 years, which would explain why employees are still familiar with the membership cards and its benifits.
i have a friend who claims to have heard to white castle employees discussing the elderly man who had just got his grandson a nickel burger with a card. they had only heard rumors of their existence prior to this.
The handbook also shows the employees how to identify a fake card, there are hidden markings, sort of like a dollar. A man from Canada copied this page out of the handbook and made 20 fake cards, which White Castle had no choice but to honor, because they could not prove that they were fake. He made 420,000 dollars selling these cards on sites like ebay.
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