Ben and Jerry’s Free Ice Cream
by Amelia G : April 21st, 2009
If you live on the West Coast like me, it is not too late to get free ice cream from Ben and Jerry’s today. Southern California has been having a crazy heatwave. I confess to worshiping at the alter of frosty central air conditioning, but I had to leave the house yesterday to get espresso beans for iced lattes and was stunned at how fast it has gone from chilly to insanely hot this year. I guess this is the part where I should probably deconstruct the ways in which all strata of counterculture are marketed to disingenuously most of the time. I could talk about how people think there are these two hippies Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield who built an ice cream empire subsisting on a shoe-string budget, making strongly flavored ice cream according to their own personal quirky stoner tastes, and serving it in an old gas station. I could talk about the ferocious rivalry between Ben and Jerry’s and Häagen-Dazs and how Häagen-Dazs attempted to keep Ben and Jerry’s out of their distribution channels and Ben and Jerry’s repeatedly sued Häagen-Dazs and started a whole PR campaign with the slogan, “What’s the Doughboy afraid of?” If you are wondering where that slogan came from, the answer is that Häagen-Dazs is owned by Pillsbury, or at least was at the time, and Ben and Jerry’s was . . .
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