Thrifty Drugstores used to be everywhere around Southern California. Since all such chains sell pretty much the same Bayer Aspirin and calamine lotion at pretty much the same prices, most people go to the drugstore most convenient to them. If you were the owner-operator of some chain, you'd probably be thinking, "Okay, a certain amount of people will come to us because we're in their neighborhood or because their business takes them past one of our stores and they find it easy to pop in and out of our parking lots. What additional reason can we give them to patronize us instead of our competitors?"
The main thing (of course) is to sell people on the idea that you have the very lowest prices and the folks who ran Thrifty Drug and Discount Stores tried that with their name and in every bit of their advertising. They also tried it with ice cream. Every Thrifty store I ever went into as a kid had a counter selling very good ice cream cones for an unbelievable bargain. I remember a nickel for a one-scoop cone and a dime for a two-scooper.
You did not go to a Thrifty ice cream counter for anything fancy. Some stores offered milk shakes and sundaes but I do not recall ever seeing anyone get anything but a cone or a scoop or two in a cup. They usually had around a dozen flavors — standard ones like vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, a sherbet or two, plus one odd one that whatever it was called, it was pink and filled with multi-colored sprinkles. I usually had the orange sherbet — or if I went for two, orange sherbet and vanilla with the vanilla on the bottom. The arrangement was important because it was better if the orange melted down to flavor the vanilla than if it worked the other way around.
It was very cheap ice cream and it was also very good ice cream. I mysteriously lost my sweet tooth in 2007 and have tasted no dessert-type edibles since then. Still, I can remember how good a Thrifty ice cream cone was. There was nothing wrong with a Baskin-Robbins ice cream cone but you had to make a special trip to get one of those and since they cost more, they seemed like more of an extravagance. Few parents hesitated to buy their kids a nickel cone when they stopped in at those drugstores to pick up some kaopectate and Band-Aid® brand band-aids.
It was expert marketing. It gave you a reason to buy your medicines and small necessities at Thrifty instead of, say, your friendly neighborhood Sav-On Drug Store. Some Sav-Ons had ice cream counters too but they weren't as good or as cheap. Also, the cheap ice cream made people assume that everything at a Thrifty was a bargain.
I'm repeating a few of the things said in this newspaper article which our pal Vince Waldron called to my attention. Long ago, the Thrifty drugstore empire was purchased by and merged into the Rite-Aid chain but most still had Thrifty ice cream counters…and now, the company that owns Von's Markets (and Safeway and Albertson's) has purchased the Thrifty ice cream business.
Does this mean the end of those counters? I dunno and neither does the person who wrote the article. It doesn't matter a lot to me since I don't eat ice cream and the Thrifty product is no longer so notably cheaper. Still, it's nice to remember those great ice cream counters with their unique cylindrical scoops and the way you felt the cones were almost free. I recall one time when I was probably around seven and my Aunt Dot was about to buy us two — one for her, one for me. I had a dime in my pocket and before she could open her purse, I flipped the coin up onto the counter and said, "Don't worry. I've got this."
