Flashback Friday

Editor/Publisher's note: I've always referred to soft drinks as "pop".

I've mentioned before how when I was a kid, getting to drink a bottle of pop was a big deal - not like it is today, where kids take soft drinks for granted. I would get to drink a pop on Friday nights, when we would have our Friday night fish and again on Saturday night when we would have popcorn while watching TV. Other than those two times on the weekend, I would drink iced tea or milk. My soft drink of choice as a kid was either cola or root beer - two of my favorite soft drinks to this day. Back in the day, we had a store that sold nothing but pop, appropriately named The Pop Shoppe.



We were fortunate and had a Pop Shoppe in our neighborhood. It was a simple store, but a great idea - they sold different flavors of pop in short, returnable glass bottles (called "stubbies") that came in a red plastic case of 24. Unlike the grocery stores that would frown upon a customer who would put four Orange Crush in a carton with four Cokes, you could mix and max flavors in your 24-pack at the Pop Shoppe. They had cola, lime, cream soda, grape, orange, pineapple, root beer and wild cherry. Plus they were cheaper than the price of 24 name brand soft drinks.

The Pop Shoppe opened it's first store in Ontario, Canada in 1969 by two businessmen from London, Ontario. Their idea was to start making pop and sell it out of their own stores, cutting out the middlemen and selling it cheaper than other pop manufacturers. By 1975, the Pop Shoppe had expanded and had stores in 11 U.S. cities - one of which was good ol' Louisville, KY. By 1977, sales at The Pop Shoppe had reached 1 million bottles per day. Sales started slowing down in the U.S. and in Canada, but The Pop Shoppe managed to stay in business until the mid 80's. In 2002, an entrepreneur named Brian Alger resurrected The Pop Shoppe, and started marketing it in mainstream stores and food service operations instead of stand-alone shops. You can still find The Pop Shoppe in Canada, but unfortunately none have reopened in the U.S.

My favorite memory of The Pop Shoppe is from my softball playing days. From the sixth grade up until my early twenty's, I played on our church softball team, and during the late 70's our coach, Chester, would bring a cooler full of pop from The Pop Shoppe to every game. Win or lose, when the game was over we would always get a bottle of pop from The Pop Shoppe. But there was one stipulation: we had to drink them there at the ball field - we couldn't take them home to finish because he wanted the bottles back so he could turn them in and get his deposit back.