I got the lizards before the blocko store, too, and so did the sandwedgeking. And I didn't get Johnny Fiestas after the Egg Council guy (I just haven't gotten the Egg council guy). It's not so much the order of the major prizes, but the stuff surrounding it.
I don't think there's one order (first everyone gets x, then y, then z)--folks would have figured that out by now. But maybe there's a master list for each box (a list of at least 81 items, I would guess, but could be any number more than that). The place you start is randomly determined (or maybe assigned to your ID#, like the common color was). When you get to the end, you go back to the beginning. It seems like an easy way to program the guarantees (just make sure that in every chunk of 81 boxes in the sequence contains the guaranteed prize at least once). I have no idea how the gold box fits in with that theory, though.
I am open to the idea that it's all the repetition of sequence is just a coincidence (human brains are pattern seeking machines, and that leads us to find signal in noise all too often). BUT, I think there is pretty strong evidence that it's not just random assignment: unless I'm thinking about odds wrong, we should see at least one set of at least three gold eggs in a row somewhere in this data.
