My Grandmother and the Haagen Dazs Ice Cream Scam

My Grandmother was a great person, who could be as quiet as the sphinx and then suddenly explode with opinions about the oddest subjects. Be it her opinion on TV detectives (they should be male and handsome) or her ice cream, whenever she spoke, we listened.

The ice cream thing was particularly controversial because like many families in the eighties, we got caught up in the pint ice cream craze. We sought out the fancy ice creams like Haagen-Dazs and Frusen Gladje, but not my Nana. She was thoroughly convinced that any ice cream that cost that much was a complete scam and that Sealtest was good enough for anyone.

To anyone who would listen, once she was up on her soapbox, she would exclaim, “you know that stuff is made in New Jersey and not in some Scandinavian country?”

She was right, of course, this stuff was all marketing, and we were all fooled into thinking we were getting something special for our money. To this day, I feel stupid buying ice cream by the pint.

Whenever I am standing in front of the freezer section, I hear her voice in my head directing me down the aisle to larger tubs of ice cream and I find myself wanting to say to that person picking up a pint next to me, “you know that stuff is the same thing as what they put in here, just more expensive.”