Richard Shotton

And then people started going to the ice stores instead of the grocery store to pick up the staples.

Then they started installing fuel pumps because if people are going to be stopping to pick up the ice and kitchen staples, they might as well fuel their car as well.

This model of ice store became so popular that the Southland Ice Company expanded its hours and then eventually rebranded itself to be named after those hours.

And the 7-Eleven was born.

That's right.

It was an ice store.

It sure was.

You know, in the very early days, ice was very much a luxury.

It was expensive to ship and it was expensive to store.

After the rise of mechanically made ice, the cost of a block of ice started to come down to the point where most Americans could afford it.

And then, of course, today you can go to the local convenience store and buy a bag of ice for two bucks.

Ice usually lasted about a week.

So ice boxes were kind of small wooden boxes that were lined with tin.

And the early ones weren't very great, but like anything else with time, technological advances made them a bit better.

And so by time we're in the late 19th, early 20th century, they're pretty much airtight.

And the ice, yeah, would last for about a week.

The ice was usually stored in an upper compartment of an icebox and there was a hole in the bottom of that compartment so that the cold air would kind of snake its way through into the bottom compartment where people would store their perishables like milk and meats and fruits and vegetables and the like.

Yeah, so the ice cube was a marketing ploy by a lot of companies to sell first ice boxes and then ice makers.

And what's really, I thought was really interesting in my research is that a lot of early manufacturers of ice boxes sold not just the trays that people would freeze ice cubes in, but also recipe books

with quote unquote recipes for how to make interesting ice and all of these recipes would involve things like freezing unusual things in the ice cubes or you know using coffee or juice instead of water but they were a huge draw for owning an icebox being able to have these tiny little cubes that you could pop out of metal trays they eventually became rubber and plastic