Give-aways
Yesterday I stopped in at the neighborhood Braum’s store to avail myself of their produce section. I love that there’s a mini grocery store in Braum’s now. As I was checking out, the clerk asked me if I had received my free ice cream scoop. I had not and since I was obviously buying more that the requisite $10 worth of stuff, I was presented with one.
This morning as I was putting it away, I remembered how many other similar ice cream scoops we had. Nearly all of them came Perryton, Texas. No, there’s not a factory there, but through the years, my dad was the recipient of some pretty great give-aways from the local agriculture-related businesses–usually at Christmas time. Items came from the Equity, where we took the harvested grain, the All-County Supply, where we bought John Deere tractors and combines and parts and where my brother worked for a while, and North Plains Electric, the regional electricity cooperative.
Some of these items I came by after both of our parents had died and we had to clean out their house. But probably more of them came from “shopping the kitchen” on visits home. There were always “extra” spatulas, cake or pie servers, yardsticks, ice cream scoops, and even fly swatters. So handy. I don’t know if the folks who gave these items away to their customers realized their generosity would travel to “the City”, as they called Oklahoma City out there, but I guess that’s part of the plan of such items–advertising far and wide.
In more recent years, it seems like most of these places began giving away the ubiquitous cap with their ad on the front. That was good for the men, who comprised the majority of their customers, at least the one of the family they saw the most often–but not so good for those of us who counted on the trickle-down theory for some of life’s conveniences. (Ever try to buy a yardstick? They’re pretty hard to come by.) And shopping the pile of hats in the garage wasn’t nearly as much fun as finding an “extra” utensil in the kitchen.