When I was a kid, my parents used to take us kids to The Pop Shoppe every once in a while. The Pop Shoppe was a warehouse type of place with generic bottles of soda on the shelves, in every flavor you could imagine!
When you first arrived, you’d take a pop crate from the entrance and then add bottles of soda to the crate, in all your favorite flavors.
Lime Soda.
Cherry Cola.
Root Beer.
Ginger Ale.
Orange Soda.
Chocolate Soda (yes, Chocolate).
Grape Soda.
Pineapple Soda.
Vanilla Soda
… the list goes on.
Each shelf in The Pop Shoppe had crates of different flavors, all in glass bottles. You could pick-and-choose your flavors, in whatever quantity you wanted – just add the bottles to your crate.
Once you had your crates filled with bottles, you checked out and someone would help bring the crates of pop out to your car. Now that was service!
Of course, you kept your bottles so you could bring them back the next visit. The bottles were recycled and eventually refilled with awesome flavors for your next visit.
While going through my parents garage this past winter, we found an old crate of pop bottles that we never returned from when we were kids. Ah… the memories…
