Pop At The Pumps

Posted by Nostalgiaholic | on April 30, 2008

The rise and fall of The Pop Shoppe, a Canadian homemade soft-drink revolution. Plus, a lament for the days when gas stations were more then just 24 hr. coffee and burrito barns.

Gas stations have always occupied a special place in my memories. Everything from the noise of traffic to the smell of gasoline on hot tarmac, though despised by most, is particularly pleasant to me.

Pop Shoppe Van Gas stations are where people meet, make plans and prepare for whatever adventures the weekend has in store. The central hub for the post-nuclear family. And not so long ago, it was a place where you could buy things. No, not twinkies, over-priced water and cheap cigarettes, I mean strange things, specialty items that only certain gas stations had.

It began in the 50s and 60s as a form of incentive to draw in the station-wagon family vacation crowds. If you ran a gas station that sold ice cream, or collectible toy cars or something that kids loved, their parents would buy it to occupy them during the drive. Once your station’s reputation spread around the schoolyard every kid in town HAD to nag their parents to check it out. You can bet your next months rent that little Timmy would make his parent’s drive down to Grandma’s house a living hell if they didn’t gas up at your pumps and receive a ten-cent tin robot… It’s not rocket science, it’s just good business !

Business continued into the 70s and grew from toy cars and milk caps to anything you could imagine. Drive-up windows were added to accelerate the speed which Pins, cap guns, specialty chocolates and candies, action figures and sticker books could be dispensed to rabid pre-teens. Soon, Gas stations were sharing a roof with entire ice-cream parlors and cafes (the pre-cursors to today’s Gas-’n-Go convenience stores). It was at one of these hybrid Saturday-morning institutions that I had my very first taste of Black Cherry Cola. It was in the busy shop bursting out from behind a local gas bar that sold soda pop, and only soda pop. It was called, appropriately enough, The Pop Shoppe.

Started in 1969 in far out London, Ontario, the Pop Shoppe was a Canadian homespun sensation! As the name would suggest, the store specialized in a variety of glass-bottled pop that could be purchased individually for curb-side consumption or in plastic-fantastic crates of 24 to cover the whole weekend. The distinctive shape of their bottles (called “Stubbies”) and the classic Pop Shoppe labels were instantly recognizable, each of the myriad original flavours corresponding to a different colour. Now, let’s talk flavours;

Pop Shoppe Lineup

Cream Soda, Black Cherry, Lime Rickey, Pinapple, Dad’s Root Beer, Grape, Orange, Bubble Gum, Blue Raspberry, Pink Something-or-other, and a whole lot more I can’t remember !!!

And if you didn’t want a 24 crate of just one flavour, you could lay your five fingers around as many different coloured bottles as you wanted and pack ‘em into the same crate, no extra charge! This was because the business ran on recycling the empty stubbies that were returned with the crates. I remember exploring the cavernous return room behind the gas station with my dad when I was very young. The floors were damp concrete and the crates were stacked like a vast plastic maze, the bottles inside reflecting the white summer sun like diamonds. My dad got a deposit back every time we returned our empties, the Pop Shoppe factory got another schwack of bottles to re-use, and mother nature smiled.

So did under-schooled hockey legend Eddie Shack in this Pop Shoppe Ad from the 70s.

dead gas station All was sunshine and lollipops for the Pop Shoppe until the early 80s when sales ran out of gas (no pun there, honest!). Coca-Cola and Pepsi dominated the soda market and a flood of no-name generic cola brands filled supermarket shelves at waaaaaaay cheaper prices then the stubbies could compete with. The company quietly closed it’s factories and sales outlets in 1983, leaving behind mountains of their trademark stubby bottles and plastic crates.

The gas stations had changed too. No longer were they privately owned newsstands and cafes, but neon-coloured franchise outlets for plastic-wrapped fast food. Every family had at least one car in the 80s, and I guess no-one was interested in spending any more time at the pumps as they had too. Faster, cheaper, more generic and more disposable products filled the shelves at every “Gas ‘n Go” station , proclaiming the end of the Corner Gas Era. Pop Shoppe Poster

The Pop Shoppe experienced a renaissance in 2004 when a Toronto firm bought the brand name and started pumping out a new line of Nostalgia-geared carbonated beverages through the usual (ie. 7-11 store) channels. They’re just as brightly coloured as I remember, and taste great, but somehow don’t kindle the embers of my memories like I thought they would…. It’s something about the bottle… It’s just not… wait… It’s not the same bottles at all!

After some digging on Wikipedia I learned that the new company bulldozed over the millions of re-usable empty bottles left behind by the last company, and just produced their own. No bottle return, no gas-station depots, just piles of dead baby seals…. errrr… sorry, it just seems so anti-environmental. Anyway, you can check out the brand-new Pop Shoppe company website HERE and decide for yourself if it lives up to your recollections.

I guess even the sweetest soda pop will go flat after 30 years.

Much love.

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