Comments on: Mr Yummy battles Mr Whippy in Blackburn Ice Cream War

By: jimh

jimh — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 17:42:00 +0000

Re: the horror of waiting for ice cream in SF- you should see the line at Bi-Rite on any given evening!

By: jackbird

jackbird — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 00:38:00 +0000

Given the price disparity between the two commodities, how did that work?

By: Preston Sturges

Preston Sturges — Sun, 10 Jun 2012 18:19:00 +0000

Our neighborhood had an ice cream truck with the Grateful Dead ice cream picture. He didn’t deal drugs, but he would accept drugs in exchange for sweets.

By: Wreckrob8

Wreckrob8 — Sun, 10 Jun 2012 17:26:00 +0000

The ice cream vans where I was brought up certainly never sold cigarettes. The kids had to walk to the shops and stock up on Saturdays just like their parents. Maybe it’s a Northern thing.

By: Peter Gow

Peter Gow — Sun, 10 Jun 2012 16:31:00 +0000

Ever see Bill Forsyth’s 1984 film COMFORT AND JOY (about the ice creams wars, but without the murder-by-arson)? Worth a watch, absolutely!

By: stovedoor

stovedoor — Sun, 10 Jun 2012 16:19:00 +0000

I think you may have learned about it here. I know I did. http://boingboing.net/2012/06/05/random-history-from-wikipedia.html

By: markday

markday — Sun, 10 Jun 2012 16:05:00 +0000

I suspect the reality is neither as dramatic as drug turf wars (most of the time) nor as amusing as ice-cream market share.

Crappy urban planning (vast swathes of residential — in some cases public — housing, with limited shopping facilities) and poor public health (plenty of cigarette smokers) pretty much = a license to print money.

Certainly, growing up in the 70′s in the ‘burbs, on a Sunday afternoon when the shops were closed, the “ice cream van” was pretty much a mobile cigarette vending machine, complete with kids lining up to buy them “for my mum” (cause you could do that in those days….)

It’s a low-overhead monopoly business where your customers mostly pay cash (or at least that was the case way back when). Not surprising that things get a bit out of hand from time to time.

By: Wreckrob8

Wreckrob8 — Sun, 10 Jun 2012 15:59:00 +0000

Played ‘at’ you? Sounds like you really suffered, mate!

By: Felton / Moderator

Felton / Moderator — Sun, 10 Jun 2012 15:59:00 +0000

Begun this cone war has.

By: BarBarSeven

BarBarSeven — Sun, 10 Jun 2012 15:57:00 +0000

And so, the “Ice Cream Wars” have begun.

By: BarBarSeven

BarBarSeven — Sun, 10 Jun 2012 15:57:00 +0000

If I were a kid, I’d love an ice cream war!

By: bolamig

bolamig — Sun, 10 Jun 2012 15:05:00 +0000

[Someone thinking of the children]

By: bolamig

bolamig — Sun, 10 Jun 2012 15:03:00 +0000

I love San Francisco. Where else would people suffer the horror of waiting for ice cream just to support the underdog.

By: Vincenzo Ravina

Vincenzo Ravina — Sun, 10 Jun 2012 14:52:00 +0000

Where were the children looking on in horror in that video?

By: Dug

Dug — Sun, 10 Jun 2012 14:17:00 +0000

I feel lucky, around here it plays The Liberty Bell March.I always imagine I’m going to see a giant foot driving around selling ice cream.

By: Daniel Cosby

Daniel Cosby — Sun, 10 Jun 2012 13:54:00 +0000

“The wound is… very sweet”

By: YourMessageHere

YourMessageHere — Sun, 10 Jun 2012 12:55:00 +0000

I wish someone had told me that when I lived on the 16th floor of a Newcastle tower block and had four-minute bursts of ‘match of the day’ title music (Mr Whippy remix) played at me, unoccluded by walls, every damn day.

By: YourMessageHere

YourMessageHere — Sun, 10 Jun 2012 12:50:00 +0000

that’s “Oi!”, but in a Blackburn accent, so it becomes “Oeyy!”

By: Wreckrob8

Wreckrob8 — Sun, 10 Jun 2012 10:09:00 +0000

In the UK there are legal restrictions on the length of time chimes can be sounded (4 seconds only) the frequency (no more than once every two hours in any one street) and the times (between 12-19pm). It was reported on the BBC world service last week that a driver in Peterborough was banned for playing his chimes too long.

By: angusm

angusm — Sun, 10 Jun 2012 08:24:00 +0000

Oh God, the horrible MIDI version of “Turkey in the Straw”. I get that all summer long.

Urge to kill. Rising.

By: M S Stanley

M S Stanley — Sun, 10 Jun 2012 07:00:00 +0000

Father always told me that monkey blood was the red sauce topping used on van-bought ice cream.
So he was right about the blood but wrong about the whole lower primate thing?

By: EH

EH — Sun, 10 Jun 2012 05:56:00 +0000

Also, Seinfeld, "The Parking Space."

By: EH

EH — Sun, 10 Jun 2012 05:52:00 +0000

It introduced me to the old pop song "The Band Played On," which took me 25 years to learn the name of because I never heard it anywhere else until (somehow) the Internet found it for me. I would pay good money for the 70s vintage ice cream chimes that played the song from the trucks in my neighborhood. Kind of a Rosebud thing.

By: woid

woid — Sun, 10 Jun 2012 04:02:00 +0000

I read the news today, oh boy
An ice cream war in Blackburn, Lancashire

By: voiceinthedistance

voiceinthedistance — Sun, 10 Jun 2012 02:35:00 +0000

Much more exciting than my own experience in San Francisco in the 80s, when two ice cream truck drivers were competing for the same territory. My business had been on a route for quite a few months that was the turf of a particular independent contractor with his own truck. One day, another truck showed up five minutes before the normal guy. The first day everybody bought their regular ice cream from the new driver, but then noticed the original driver show up with no customers right after him. The second day, we waited for our regular driver and demonstrated our ice cream truck loyalty. That went on for several weeks, with the new driver obviously patterning his stops after the first, and trying to usurp his territory. We had no idea what the final resolution was for that little skirmish, but the net result to us was that first we had one truck, then two . . . and . . .then . . .there . . . were . . . none. I still tear up thinking about it.

By: ImmutableMichael

ImmutableMichael — Sun, 10 Jun 2012 00:16:00 +0000

My former mother in law told her kids ice cream can ice cream was made by the drivers at home in the bathtub. She preceded the “horrors of home meth labs” PSAs by decades!

Edit – ice cream VAN ice cream

By: Sekino

Sekino — Sat, 09 Jun 2012 23:48:00 +0000

That’s so Simpsons-esque. I can totally picture Ralph watching the scene and bawling hysterically.

By: mati

mati — Sat, 09 Jun 2012 23:40:00 +0000

FWIW, a few years back a friend of mine had a summer job running an ice cream truck and his experience was consistently, surreally similar to this. Usually, your profit margins on the truck are razor thin–the company basically makes you buy the stock (and gas) from them and then recoup costs selling it. There were maybe 4-5 known highly successful spots to sell. If you grabbed one on a sunny day, you made a ton of money and the whole thing financially made sense; if you didn’t you went home at the end of the day in the hole $40-$50. So things got….turfy. He called the cops on other drivers twice and, on what would be his last day on the job, had one follow him for over 30 miles harassing him. Which is, I guess, a roundabout way of saying: careful out there, kids.

By: Nikhil Joshi

Nikhil Joshi — Sat, 09 Jun 2012 22:41:00 +0000

Wow, my first thought was 100 Bullets… I had no idea that ice cream truck wars is a meme.

By: nettdata

nettdata — Sat, 09 Jun 2012 22:33:00 +0000

I was doing a few years of contract work at Electronic Arts in their somewhat large, fairly open-air, multi-story campus in Burnaby. Someone in the Facilities department thought it would be a good idea to get an ice cream cart and wander through all the game teams to sell them ice cream during a few hot summer days. They had rigged the cart to play the 12 second clip of the ice cream truck music over and over and over and over, and it was LOUD. Loud enough that you could hear it from your desk during the cart’s entire 2 hour tour through the building.

The first day they did it, it was somewhat tolerated, because after all, it was ice cream. By the second day, hundreds of developers lost their shit and were yelling for it to go the fuck away and never come back.

Even a few weeks later we screwed with people’s unattended cell phones by switching their ringer to that music, and the violent response it evoked in the local devs when it was called was both surprising and entertaining as hell.