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The Pop Shoppe

Posted: 01 Nov 2007 15:20
by scanman2
Anybody remember the Pop Shoppe? You would buy various flavors of loose sodas and take them home in a crate and bring back the empty bottles. The one I remember in Anaheim CA was a drive through. Loved the grape and ginger ale flavors.

Posted: 21 Nov 2007 10:44
by Toby Radloff
I recall similar operations in Cleveland, one called "Towne Club" (which I think was based out of Detroit), which offered 7-ounce returnable mix-and-match bottles of flavored pop (I don't recall seeing colas or diets), in 24-bottle cases, through company-operated stores. Towne Club was in business in the 1970's. Also, local beverage stores and mom-and-pop groceries and delis sold "Little Tom" and "O-So-Grape/O-So-Good" sodas, again by the 24-bottle mix-and-match cases. These little bottles pretty much appealed to children, and the pop itself, especially the cherry soda, was pretty good. Again I don't recall seeing cola or anything diet among the flavors. "Pic-A-Pop" was another such brand I recall. I think Little Tom and O-So went out of business in the early 1980's, when sodas in returnable bottles were losing their popularity in favor of disposable/recyclable aluminum cans or plastic bottles, and the big boys in the pop industry (Pepsi, Coke, Dr. Pepper/7-Up) were taking over a lot of the smaller bottlers or putting them out of business in the fight for precious shelf space. Dr. Pepper/Seven-Up took over Cleveland's Cotton Club brand several years ago.

Posted: 21 Nov 2007 11:32
by runchadrun
The California franchise for Pop Shoppe was obtained by the warm and fuzzily-named Commercial International Corporation in 1975 and they opened in Orange County in August, 1975. In 1976 they had 12 locations in and around OC and 9 in San Diego. Around the same time another chain with a similar concept called Pop Places started up.

Re: The Pop Shoppe

Posted: 19 Dec 2007 20:55
by turbocsx
we had the pop shoppe in ny also. I remember as a kid, we would load the empty cases into my mom's 1979 thunderbird trunk.

Re: The Pop Shoppe

Posted: 03 Jan 2008 19:13
by Dean
I remember a similar SoCal chain...think it was called THIRST 'N POP.

Re: The Pop Shoppe

Posted: 03 Jan 2008 21:23
by jamcool
A lot of these "pop" stores were converted gas stations.

Re: The Pop Shoppe

Posted: 04 Jan 2008 16:58
by Dave
A local operator of gas stations and c-stores, East Coast Oil, opened something similar in Richmond called Lolli Pop back in the early '70's. The Lolli Pop locations later became The Pop Shoppe locations, whether by acquisition by them or another means, I don't know.

Re: The Pop Shoppe

Posted: 04 Jan 2008 17:38
by Groceteria
There are still Pop Shoppe locations in around North Carolina, particularly around Charlotte, and they seem to somehow be related to the Citgo gas stations there. I've even been to Citgo stations that didn't have Pop Shoppe signs that still featured the name on their receipts.

Re: The Pop Shoppe

Posted: 06 Jan 2008 23:10
by tesg
The Pop Shoppe used to sponsor the "Ramblin' Rod" Show on KPTV Portland...a locally produced kids show. They had a bleacher full of kids, with Rod coming out on a "boat" to the right. Basically, Rod cut promos and held contests between old cartoons, much like other local cartoon shows of the day across the country.

One of the segments of the show was a smiling contest where the winner won "Pop Shoppe pop", as Rod would say. The panned every kid in the bleachers, who were always looking at themselves in the monitor...never at the camera. So when I went to the show (as part of a birthday party group...around third grade), I actually looked in the camera. Oddly enough, everybody noticed this at school after it aired.

I didn't win, but after they announced the winners and went to break, the kids who won were all fighting over which flavor they were going to get. Somebody with the show, losing patience, shouts "KNOCK IT OFF! THEY ALL TASTE THE SAME!"

And the whole room went silent.

But that's what I'd always heard...that Pop Shoppe didn't actually HAVE a taste. I don't recall ever getting to try it to find out for myself.

Re: The Pop Shoppe

Posted: 23 Nov 2008 18:53
by carolinatraveler
The Pop Shop stores in North Carolina are operated by Mid-State Oil Company of Lexington, NC. Mid-State is a distributor for Citgo and BP gasoline and private brands stations under the old Travelers name. Mid State was originally a Shell jobber, later Phillips 66, based in Salisbury that was purchased in 1968 by Sun Oil and merged with the Wilmington based Travelers Oil, both distributing Sunoco gas until Sun Oil left the state in the early 1990s. At that time the entire operation was spun off to local investors, who took the name Pop Shop as their c-store brand.
The old Pop Shoppe soft drink operation was, I belive, a franchise available to the then primative convenience store industry. Some were stand-alone, others partnered with existing gas station operations (East Coast in Richmond, Rich's (owned by Rich's supermarkets) in Newport News both at some time operated Pop Shoppe locations.


Wayne Henderson