A quick story about Texas

This re-run was originally published Thursday, February 23, 2006. I'm running it because I just thought of a funny nickname for Ben Cohen. "Ice Cream Cohen." Get it? I can't believe it took thirty years for someone to think of that.

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I lived in Austin, Texas in 1997 and 1998. While there I worked for a small, upstart ice cream company called Amy’s. My job was to make ice cream. So one day Amy and I were chatting, and noting I was from Vermont, she mentioned her dealings with Ben and Jerry’s.

You see at that time Amy had about five shops in Austin and San Antonio, but she wanted to start selling pints of ice cream in stores, too. She told me that Ben and Jerry had stopped that from happening by threatening to pull their business from all of the area companies with refrigerated trucks if they distributed for Amy.

That sounded like a vaguely familiar scenario. Where had I heard that before? Oh yeah, isn’t that what Pillsbury famously did to Ben and Jerry’s once? Remember the “What’s the Doughboy Afraid Of?” ad campaign?

She said she had spoken with each of them on the phone. According to her, Jerry was a nice guy and seemed almost apologetic about the whole thing, while Ben said something like ‘We’re big and you’re small so F you.”

This has been a quick story about Texas.