Ice Cream Truck Turf War

[melidasaur]

Apparently, the competing ice cream trucks have picked my street to be their battle territory.

Each truck drives up and down my street - which is not a major street in town and there are not a lot of kids - 3 or 4 times a day. Each drive-by is done in two passes of the street, they drive down one way, then turn around at the end of the street and drive back.

Don't get me wrong... I love ice cream. However, I feel like these two trucks are preying on my neighborhood. I understand the ice cream man/woman needs to earn a buck, but why do they need to drive up and down my street 3-4 times a day?

When I was a kid, the ice cream truck came through our neighborhood once a week, maybe sometimes once a day, but that was rare.

Don't even get me started on the music!

Is this the trend across the nation? Is anyone here an ice cream truck driver or been one in the past?

I'm sure I wouldn't give a rats if I were employed - because I wouldn't be home during the day - but this gives me something to get worked up about .

[Elspode]

The music...aaarrggghhhh.

How come we can get matchbox sized telephones to play polyphonic versions of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, but ice cream trucks can't play anything except monotonal renditions of Comin' Round the Mountain?

[glatt]

Around here, the ice cream trucks hang out at the kids' softball games and at the playgrounds. Our residential street with a dozen kids never gets a visit.

[Clodfobble]

That's probably because you live in a moderately upper-class neighborhood, glatt. I had practically never even seen an ice cream truck until I lived in a really trashy neighborhood for a year, and then they came up and down the street several times a day. I came to the conclusion that lower-class parents are more likely to let their kids eat random sweets in the middle of the day...

[lookout123]

or they are less likely to be home.

[Undertoad]

Comfort & Joy

A quirky little film about an ice cream truck turf war in Glasgow Scotland.

[be-bop]

Hey Comfort and Joy was a nice wee picture with a happy ending,but I remember the real Turf Wars in Glasgow where people died.
The war was actually about trading drugs rather than Ice cream,the vans were selling dope as well as ice cream.
Anyway one family wouldn't give up their patch and someone poured petrol through their door and torched the house.
Can't remember how many died but two guys spent nearly twenty years in jail and were framed for the crime.
Now Ice Cream routes are licenced by the local authorities.

[SteveDallas]

I loathe the ice cream truck. There's one that comes around daily during the summer and the kids became obsessed with it last summer. Blech.

[plthijinx]

Originally Posted by Clodfobble

That's probably because you live in a moderately upper-class neighborhood, glatt. I had practically never even seen an ice cream truck until I lived in a really trashy neighborhood for a year, and then they came up and down the street several times a day. I came to the conclusion that lower-class parents are more likely to let their kids eat random sweets in the middle of the day...

same here. where i live now there's "skid row" just outside the neighborhood across the semi-busy street. i can hear an ice cream truck every day cruising the parking lot of the apartments but have never seen him enter our neighborhood.

when i first saw this thread the first thing that came to mind was cheech and chong!

[zippyt]

The war was actually about trading drugs rather than Ice cream,the vans were selling dope as well as ice cream.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8169669/

Dude ,, Gonzo the ice cream dude was the COOLEST icecream dude , Always so MELLOW , Good icecream ,,,
Then later when we reconized the smell , he was a good HOOK UP !!!!!

[ashke]

We never have ice-cream trucks coming around in Singapore. It's probably because we're a country of high-rise buildings... But, we do have a lot of ice-cream vendors around on their tricycles. No characteristic ice-cream coming music, though... they just seem to stand around waiting for people to come...

[Trilby]

I occasionally see an ice-cream truck in my neighborhood (definitely middle of the middle classes) but he, like, races through so it's tough to catch him. I think he's lost his passion for his work.

[wolf]

I haven't seen an operating Ice Cream Truck for years. I mean there was this one guy in Norristown who HAD an ice cream truck, and he may have occaisonally had ice cream in the truck, but it turned out he was molesting children, so I don't see the truck any more.

An ice cream man who doesn't have a truck with a jingle (just a mid-size diesel reefer) delivers ice cream to the machine for the nuts at work (there is no staff ice cream machine) but he gives us some of the tasty treats that have passed expiration date ...

I have never seen him smile.

[Elspode]

He gives away ice cream, for crying out loud...what's not to smile about?

[Radar]

This is a very funny topic for me because I was once caught up in an ice-cream truck turf war in Las Vegas. One summer I took a job driving an ice-cream truck. Vegas is very hot, and therefore very competitive in the ice-cream business.

There was another guy called "Dan the candy man" who was driving in my areas. At one point we found ourselves not only in the same neighborhood, but on the same street. We leapfrogged each other and it started getting ugly. He was an old guy with bars on his window and he drove a crappy truck. I drove a clean white truck with an open window. My truck also had lights so I could come by as late as 9pm which some parents didn't like too much. The only time the music got to be a problem was when you were going through a Cul-de-sac and it would echo off the houses. I ended up just telling the parents in the area that you can't trust a guy who has to hide behind bars on his window, and that he was selling more than just ice-cream (which he was).

Sorry, but my thoughts just got de-railed. As I was writing this, I saw something extremely disturbing on the television. I just saw Paul Anka singing a Nirvana song.