Ice Cream Truck
Decoder Ring
Slate Podcasts
4.6 • 2.2K Ratings
🗓️ 12 August 2019
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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Why is the ice cream truck business so bananas? On this episode of Decoder Ring we find out via three seperate stories about the strange world of ice cream trucks—about the first ever ice cream trucks in China, the ongoing ice cream wars of Manhattan, and the life of an ice cream family in Brooklyn.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | In 2016, Andy Newman, a reporter for the New York Times got a tip he didn't believe. |
| 0:12.5 | Mr. Softie had been, you know, shut out of Midtown, and it seemed completely implausible. |
| 0:17.9 | In New York City, Mr. Softie, the chain of ice cream trucks that sells chocolate and |
| 0:21.9 | vanilla soft serve is a name brand. It's also like Kleenex or Scotch tape, the generic name for any |
| 0:28.7 | truck that sells soft serve. If you want that kind of ice cream, you say, I want a Mr. Softie. How could |
| 0:34.6 | the actual Mr. Softie have vanished from the heart of the city? I called the vice president of the Mr. Softie, how could the actual Mr. Softie have vanished from the heart of the city? |
| 0:38.5 | I called the vice president of the Mr. Softie company and he was like, yeah, that's what it is. |
| 0:45.7 | This upstart company drivers would threaten the Mr. Softi drivers if they came into their territory. |
| 0:52.6 | The upstart company was called New York Ice Cream. |
| 0:56.0 | So this is a New York ice cream guy who was right around the corner from the New York Times |
| 0:59.5 | office. |
| 1:00.1 | And he told me from 34th Street to 60th Street, river to river, that's ours. |
| 1:06.1 | You will never see a Mr. Softie truck in Midtown. |
| 1:08.7 | And if you do, there will be problems. If a Mr. Softie guy pulled Midtown, and if you do, there will be problems. |
| 1:12.0 | If a Mr. Softie guy pulled into a spot that they wanted to be in, they would summon |
| 1:16.8 | their fellow New York ice cream guys who would kind of surround the Mr. Softie truck, making |
| 1:22.8 | sure that he could not do any business at all. |
| 1:25.4 | Reporting the story, Andy rode around with a driver in a Mr. Softie truck. |
| 1:29.6 | As we were driving down, he would point out, like, there's the other guys with this combination |
| 1:34.3 | of hatred and awe. |
| 1:37.4 | And he would talk about how, yeah, I was on a corner right across the street from a New York |
| 1:42.9 | ice cream truck for three hours last week, you know, without incident as if this was like a great big accomplishment. |
... |
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