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Tilted Cat Head
Administrator
Location: Manhattan, NY
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almost forgot... if it's at Thrifty's (now defunct) Rite-Aid, it's Chocolate Malted Krunch. Back in the 80's it was still $.10 for a hockeypuck "scoop". $.10!!!?!?!?!?!??!?!?!!? It was just crazy! Now it's a $1, but still a great bargain compared to any other ice cream stands.
Quote:
View: Gone But Not Forgotten: Thrifty ice cream
Source: Sfgate
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Gone But Not Forgotten: Thrifty ice cream
You know there's going to be a time, 40 years down the line, when many of us will be boring our own grandchildren with stories about how much stuff cost. ("When I was a boy, gas cost less than $2 a gallon, a movie cost $5.50 and a lap dance cost $20!")
But by far the best bargain of my childhood, which I intend to tell my grandkids about every day of their young lives, was Thrifty drug store ice cream. Even in the late 1980s, it was 10 measly cents for a single cone. Ten cents! If you lived a few blocks away from the Thrifty and looked down as you walked, chances were good you would find that much on the way to the store. It was, without a doubt, the best deal of my life.
Drug store historians will argue that Thrifty ice cream still exists, and the brand never died when Rite-Aid bought out the chain a decade ago. But it's dead to me. For one thing, it costs more than a dollar now. That's a 1,000 percent price increase in less than two decades. Even Ed Barbara thinks that's a heartless rip-off of the consumer. I also recently saw someone using a rounded ice cream scoop at a Rite Aid, which is like making a "Dukes of Hazzard" movie and recasting the General Lee as a Prius.
A few observations of/tributes to Thrifty ice cream:
1. The scoop was innovative: I'm not sure what you would call the Thrifty ice cream scoops, which would dispense the frozen treat in little pucks, with 90 degree angles when you looked at the ice cream from the side. As a result a triple scoop would look more like a stack of tires than a snowman. This made the ice cream about 50 percent more stable, which was better if you were a little kid. It was kind of like having training wheels on your cone.
2. The ice cream was edible: Notice I didn't say "good." I often noticed little swirls of red in my mint chip, because the little shards of ice would cut my tongue. But it was more than good enough. The mint chip and especially the chocolate malted crunch were my favorites. The latter flavor was like eating chocolate ice cream with the most delicious packing material on Earth inside.
3. The employees were often cool: Sure, you'd get one or two clerks who rudely made the kids at the ice cream counter wait 15 minutes while they helped the customers who were actually generating a profit for the Thrifty Corp. (One wonders if the 10 cent ice cream might have led to Thrifty's demise.) But you got the impression that the checkers enjoyed the break of heading over to the ice cream counter. After all, they were kids once too. And on really hot days Thrifty would usually have a full-time ice cream person.
I'm no businessman, but if I owned a national chain of stores, I'd fill this void right now. Ten cent ice cream at Kragen Auto Parts?
Thrifty ice cream ruled.
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