Agreed. Retailers (by me, anyway) routinely left one box on the counter and threw new packs in as it emptied.
That’s incredible presence of mind to notice something like that, at such a young age. The most I would have ever picked up on is changes in pack and/or box colors, which usually meant a new Series was at hand. Let the drooling begin.
So if your local retailer was taking packs out of boxes to put them in an existing counter box over and over, it probably just means he/she couldn’t be bothered folding back the lid of every new box and popping the cardboard perforations to make the WP grocery bag graphic pop up. Which means that literally scores of pristine boxes were likely just tossed out in the trash. Mind-boggling. If we could take our current-day selves and go back in time to 1973-75 as WP preservationists, imagine the volume and variety of material that would still be surviving today. And not just Wackys, all kinds of cool candy and gum boxes, wrappers, etc. I’d probably spend every free moment loitering in candy stores, driving around to the back exits and dumpster-diving, etc.