Hintonburger KFC sign up for sale

The iconic KFC chicken bucket has been dismantled from the perch of one of Ottawa's popular hamburger stops. (Courtesy: Ottawa Kijiji Ad)

For decades, it was a Kentucky Fried Chicken. But now the building is home to a burger joint called Hintonburger. So this week, the familiar KFC sign on Ottawa’s Wellington Street West had to come down. It had been there for so long it’s become a local landmark.

“Well I’m sad. I wish they would’ve kept it,” says John Thompson, owner of The Record Centre across the street. "It's going to change how I give directions I guess."

A local scrap dealer owns the bucket now. Known simply as Blackie, he earned three hundred dollars to remove the sign. And now he's selling it on Kijiji. "$1,500 and up or it's not going nowhere," says Blackie.

That raises the question, who would want to buy a giant KFC sign, let alone pay fifteen hundred dollars for it? The truth is it could go for much more.

"I would suspect that that sign would probably be worth somewhere between $2,000 and $3,500," says Ken Aubrey, owner of Aubrey’s Antiques in south Ottawa. He’s been buying and selling vintage signs for over thrty-five years. He says there are collectors out there willing to pay big bucks for old buckets. He says they're quite rare because KFC usually takes them back. "It would have to be a collector with large warehouse-type place to store his collection simply because of the size of the sign," he adds.

Says Blackie, "If  I get the right price it goes. If not I'm going to try to get a hold of that guy I sold the other one to in Montreal."

Yes, the other one. You see, this isn't Blackie's first kick at the bucket. Five years ago he took another KFC sign down in Ottawa. He sold it for a cool $2,250. For an old chicken bucket, that's a lot of scratch.