Ice Cream Truck

In 2016, Andy Newman, a reporter for the New York Times, got a tip he didn't believe.

Mr.

Softie had been, you know, shut out of Midtown, and it seemed completely implausible.

In New York City, Mr.

Softie, the chain of ice cream trucks that sells chocolate and vanilla soft serve, is a name brand.

It's also, like Kleenex or Scotch Tape, the generic name for any truck that sells soft serve.

If you want that kind of ice cream, you say, I want a Mr.

Softie.

How could the actual Mr.

Softie have vanished from the heart of the city?

I called the vice president of the Mr.

Softie company and he was like, yeah,

that's what it is.

This upstart company drivers would threaten the Mr.

Softie drivers if they came into their territory.

The upstart company was called New York Ice Cream.

So this is a New York ice cream guy who was right around the corner from the New York Times office.

And he told me, from 34th Street to 60th Street, river to river, that's ours.

You will never see a Mr.

Softie truck in Midtown.

And if you do, there will be problems.

If a Mr.

Softie guy pulled into a spot that they wanted to be in,

they would summon their fellow New York ice cream guys who would kind of surround the Mr.

Softie truck, making sure that he could not do any business at all.

Reporting the story, Andy rode around with a driver in a Mr.

Softie truck.

As we we were driving down, he would point out, like, there's the other guys with this combination of hatred and awe.

And he would talk about how, yeah,

I was on a corner right across the street from a New York ice cream truck for three hours last week, you know, without an incident, as if this was like a great big accomplishment.

This is not the first time there's been tension, confrontation, harassment, violence in this business.

This is something that like bubbles up every few years in the newspapers.

And sometimes Mr.

Softie guys would be doing it and other times other guys would be doing it and people would get beaten up, people would get burned and robbed and all kinds of things.

It's like the ice cream wars.

This is Decodering, a show about cracking cultural mysteries.

I'm Willip Haskin.

Every month we take on a cultural question, habit, or idea, crack it open and try to figure out what it means and why it matters.

I love a soft-served chocolate cone with rainbow sprinkles, but this past May, May of 2019, when another story about ice cream truck misbehavior appeared in the local news, I started to wonder how ice cream trucks actually worked.

How I got a delicious cold $3 to $5 embodiment of summer into my hands.

And if there was something about the process of making, serving, and selling that cone that lent itself to conflict.

So today, I'm decodering a real summer treat.

We're going to make like an ice cream truck working its route with stops along the way, first in China, then in Manhattan, and finally in Brooklyn.

Starting global and getting really personal in order to answer the question, why is the soft surf ice cream truck business so bananas?

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Nothing seems like it could be further from seedy, violent adult misbehavior than ice cream, the sweet stuff of childhood and innocence.

Which is why, when these two things collide, it's so intriguing, so delicious.

The ice cream truck trade probably has no more conflict than any other street-based, weirdly regulated cash business operating in a major metropolitan area.

But that means that it has some conflict.

Over the years, ice cream trucks from California to Scotland have occasionally been caught up in turf wars and legal battles, physical violence, and the drug trade.

In order to understand why this business might be so conflict-prone, we're going to start at the very beginning.

Consider this the part of the story we're at the depot, the place that in New York, ice cream trucks park, get their supplies, and are assigned a route before heading out for the day.

Before we turn on the soft serve machine, in other words, we need to load up on a little backstory.

Softserve ice cream was first sold in the 1930s, invented, depending on who you ask, by Tom Carvell, the founder of Carvel, or John McKella, the founder of Dairy Queen.

Two decades later, two brothers in Philadelphia were working at a company that made softserve ice cream machines, and they thought there might be a business opportunity in figuring out how to get those machines onto trucks.

My father and my uncle started Mr.

Softie in 1956.

Jim Conway is the vice president and co-owner of Mr.

Softie.

They just started by building ice cream trucks and they were using the name Dairy Van.

The name Dairy Van?

Yeah.

From the start, Mr.

Softie was a franchise business.

That means the Mr.

Softie company licenses the name and the business model to third parties who run the ice cream trucks independently.

Every franchisee's contract includes an agreement about the territory that they can operate in.

A truck costs about $150,000, and the franchisees also pay an additional annual fee of $3,500 to the company for the rights to the name, the logo, an ice cream cream cone with a face on it and a bow tie, and that jingle.

The jingle was originally written in 1960 by an admin for a radio spot, and it was so catchy, they put it on the trucks.

Here comes Mr.

Salty, the soft ice cream man.

The creamy, creamy, and soft ice cream you get from Mr.

Salty.

There are now about 250 franchises operating 650 trucks in 16 states across the country.

But in order to get a sense of why the ice cream business is so prone to certain kinds of conflict, it helps to look at a place that until recently didn't have Mr.

Softie at all.

That's why the first stop on our route is the Chinese city of Suzhou, where Mr.

Softie arrived in 2007.

In New York, there's this idea that everyone in the world knows Mr.

Softie.

Because if it's here, it must be everywhere.

Turner Sparks moved to Suzhou, China, a city of 10 and a half million people, just 60 miles from Shanghai, in the mid-2000s, right after college, to teach English.

After he'd been there for a little while, he noticed something.

Soft serve ice cream was only being sold at McDonald's and KFC in China, but it was so popular at McDonald's and KFC that they had to create these almost drive-through windows

for walking up that only sold the ice cream.

There was always a line of like 20 people at all times.

Turner is from Sacramento, so he didn't grow up with Mr.

Softie, but he learned about it at college when he became good friends with the son of one of the company's co-owners, Jim Conway, who you heard from earlier.

Turner and that friend from college, who was still living in the States, and another friend, a Chinese businessman Turner had gotten to know while living there, pitched Jim Conway on bringing Mr.

Softie to Suzhou.

Oh, yeah, that sounds great.

Here's the thing, though, I have no interest in doing this, but if you guys want to do it, you can do it.

And we can work out a deal where you guys can have the rights to develop Mr.

Softie in China, but I'm not paying for it.

Turner and his partners took that deal, but it only meant something if they could convince the Suzhou government to let them on the street in the first place.

And so their questions were like, why would you want to do that?

And then they're like, well, wait, you're going to be selling ice cream to kids out of a moving vehicle?

This sounds wildly dangerous.

Right.

Like they're imagining kids just running down the street and then we like slamming on the brakes and then them all running into the back of the truck.

Over the course of a year, the guys sold the local government on the concept, figured out all the paperwork and the supply chain, got their permits and raised enough money to hire staff, build one truck, and open one store, which they had to do for tax reasons.

Their first vehicle hit the street in October of 2007.

The first truck was a hit literally immediately.

So we open that day.

We have this big party.

The truck's packed.

And we go,

we think we're going to be driving around to different neighborhoods.

We get to our first neighborhood, which is by the laser light fire show,

and we can't leave because there's 20 people on both sides wanting ice cream.

It was, I'm going to say like 1,500 cones in two hours or something like that.

It was as fast as you could pump it out.

They could get it.

What was Mr.

Softie called there?

Oh, Ranchin Shencheng, which means Mr.

Soft Heart.

Is it only chocolate novella at the beginning?

No.

At the beginning, it was all the stuff we had in America.

Plus, we had mango flavored blasts.

We had one that tasted like banana cream pie, a red bean and rice cake.

So the ice cream tasted like a rice cake, and then it had red bean and whipped cream on top, milk tea, floats, kiwi sundaes that everyone loved.

We had, I don't know, it was like a million different things.

At the company's height around 2011, they had two stores and 10 trucks.

They owned six outright and four were franchised.

Each one was making about $80,000 to $100,000 a year in sales.

They had really big plans.

Basically, there was 100 million people in an area you could drive there and back in a day.

We could franchise or grow just in our region, and that could take a decade.

So, but yeah, there was definitely a time 2010, 11, 12, 13, where we were like, this is going to go.

This is going to go huge.

And then what starts that, like, did it start to go, like, what starts to happen?

Yeah, it goes sideways.

To understand how it started to go sideways, you need to understand how soft serve is actually made.

So there's the soft serve ice cream machine, right?

Which is like, you know what that looks like.

You pull down and then twist.

And you just take mix.

It's thicker than milk, but it looks like kind of milk.

And then you pour it into the top of that.

And then it takes like two minutes.

What's happening in those two minutes is the mix, sugar, milk, cream, and some stabilizers, is getting really cold while being shot through with what is officially called overrun, but is more widely known as air.

That's one of the secrets of the business, but I guess.

What is that one of the secrets?

Because it's like...

Well, it's not really a secret, but it's less ice cream, so you're selling air.

The air, specifically, isn't part of why Turner's business went sideways.

I just love that fact.

It's also why soft serve can't be sold in grocery stores.

The stuff is ephemeral.

If you let it sit too long, it kind of deflates.

Anyway, over a period of months, a few of Turner's employees figured out a number of creative ways to sell additional cones off the books, pocketing the cash from those additional sales.

The way they could sell ice cream without selling it in a cup or bowl or cone was to buy their own cups, bowls, and cones.

and then sell out of their own.

Few months, we caught that.

Then they started buying their own ice cream mix.

So we caught that.

And then they would start watering down the mix.

And that only lasted like two weeks.

Yeah.

And we caught that.

And then our drivers

would either quit or get fired.

Sometimes quitting or getting fired was not the end of it, though.

The first guys we caught, so they were buying cups and selling out of their own cups.

And so we fired them.

I woke up the next morning and outside of my apartment, four of my tires on my car were slashed.

And then we fired this other guy and then he stole a truck and they had the police had to go find him like throughout the city in a stolen ice cream truck.

I don't know what his plan was, but he's just driving through the streets of the city in the, and also he's in the Mr.

Softie truck.

It's like the most recognizable.

He's like,

but there was something else that was more common and more troublesome.

About like a week or two after they quit or got fired, they would have their own truck parked right down the street or sometimes bumper to bumper with our truck.

As a suggestion, and it's something to keep in mind going forward, once you know how the ice cream truck business works it's not that hard to get into it doesn't cost a huge amount of money the overhead is low and it has relatively few moving parts a small menu one vehicle a few employees no lease and in china where it was all but impossible for mr softie to legally enforce its copyright the other companies that followed in mr softie's footsteps really looked the part they all had the same color scheme as us they all had like red white and blue and a lot of them had their so we had like the softie blast the softie cone And then if you look at their menus, they were just exactly the same.

It's like the Softy Cone, even though that wasn't the name of the brand.

Turner begged the Suzhou government to come in and help regulate these other trucks.

For about a year, maybe a year and a half, they had kept telling us like, yeah, we're going to regulate.

And so I was saying, just get your taxes, do a hygiene check, and regulate where they go.

Like just enforce your own laws.

And finally, after about a year, they came back to us and they said, okay, we've made a decision.

You've told us that those people shouldn't park here because they don't have permits.

So our decision is to also take away your permits.

So now you can't bother us.

The local government's changing behavior towards Mr.

Softie mirrored a larger nationwide cooling towards foreign business.

I was like, okay, well, I guess we'll keep parking and try to figure something out.

I still didn't quit at that point, and I still didn't totally understand what was going on.

And then the police started fining us every day for parking in these locations, and they weren't finding the trucks next to us.

It quickly became clear that Mr.

Softie could not continue.

Mid-2015, we decided we're closing.

We didn't leave because it was a bad business.

We left because we got shut down.

And so they all knew like, oh, this is a, this is a really good business model.

Yeah, when I go back, they're everywhere and they're all over the country now.

Turner is now a stand-up comedian and he has no regrets about his experience.

It was a decade from age 22 to 32 where I learned.

anything and everything about business the hard way and like the whatever the fun way he cannot however eat mr softie so i can't now that since i've coming back come back to America, I've developed this like

dairy.

I never had a problem with like any...

Oh, now you're lactose intolerant.

I'm just an old man, maybe.

So I can't even eat Mr.

Softie anymore.

This story makes clear that even in a place that has no tradition of ice cream trucks, the mixture of ice cream, mobility, and cash can get very volatile very quickly.

Some of what happened to Mr.

Softie in Suzhou is specific to Suzhou, but copycatting, defection, competition, and the particularly powerful impact of local city government are not, as you'll see as we head to our next stop, a place with a long tradition of ice cream trucks, New York City.

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okay so now we're going to take what we learned in suzhou about ice cream trucks tendency towards a certain amount of disorder and see what happens when that disorder has had decades to marinate new york just has an extraordinary number of ice cream trucks and food trucks.

Jim Conway, the co-owner of Mr.

Softie again.

And you don't see that virtually anywhere else in the United States.

So we have competition in New York.

We have virtually no competition anywhere else.

The key thing to understand about why soft serve trucks can get so competitive is that the only thing that really differentiates one from another is location.

I lived in New York City my whole life, and before working on this episode, I had never really noticed that most of the ice cream trucks I call Mr.

Softie are not, in fact, Mr.

Softie.

They're Freezy or Funtime or Carvelle or Bella or New York Ice Cream, and they have different colors and logos and jingles.

I never really registered the differences, though, because it doesn't matter.

They all sell basically the same thing.

The best soft-serve truck, in my experience, is the one that's right there.

On the business side of things, though, that means you want to be at the there where the most possible people are.

In New York City, that means you want to be in Midtown.

Man, that makes the best money.

This is Mike Wanner.

Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, five years.

Matthew, not his real name, works but does not own a truck in Midtown.

I've been at least two, three years in other places, but this is the best part.

In Manhattan, which is full of both tourists and office workers, cones cost at least $5 and shakes at least eight.

Well, I got five months off, but then I gotta work 17 hours a day, seven days a week.

Hello?

But the money is not bad.

And no one asks me how much.

Enough, more than what you make, probably,

in a whole year.

For various reasons, good manners, safety, taxes, ice cream trucks are a cash business.

There's a lot of obfuscation when it comes to how much a truck makes.

There's also a lot of variation, both day to day and depending on where the truck is parked.

In the outer boroughs, making about $250 a day is common, but in Midtown, it can be much, much more.

Hassan works a truck a few blocks away from Matthews.

I make if I make like $100, he give me like $25 on my bucket.

I asked Hassan how much he makes on a good day.

It's a Saturday.

Almost $1,000.

That means his truck is pulling in close to $4,000.

And where Hassan is located, there's basically a soft server vendor every two blocks.

But not every ice cream truck can be in Midtown, logistically or financially.

If there are too many, they all make less money.

And besides, it's not like there's no money to be made in the outer boroughs.

So how does it get decided?

Which truck goes where?

In Suzhou, the answer to this question was the local government.

They gave Mr.

Softie permits to sell ice cream at about a dozen specific locations and only those locations.

In New York City, where the permit system is not so orderly, locations are determined not by the city, but on the street.

In Manhattan, ice cream trucks really don't move.

Your grandfathered into a place, you know, and the people who own that truck have generally had a truck there.

Douglas Quint is one of the co-founders of Big Gay Ice Cream, which now sells ice cream in supermarkets and has brick and mortar stores.

But it started in an ice cream truck.

It was a retired Mr.

Softie truck, so it didn't have any of the softie branding on it anymore.

It was just a real clunker.

From the start, Big Gay Ice Cream sold more ambitious soft serve with elevated toppings like olive oil and toasted pine nuts.

The ice cream truck menu is boring.

Every ice cream truck pretty much has the exact same thing, it has for decades.

Toppings aside, Douglas's truck otherwise operated like any other in its fleet, which means it was assigned a location, one the company had been using for years.

In Big Gay Ice Cream's case, that was a high traffic spot right by Union Square.

Your company had had this corner, and that was just like, okay, like other people didn't try to take your spot or did they?

Occasionally they did.

And I would say, I would just get, I would go over and say, I'm here.

And as you know, this is where I park weekdays.

Please move along.

And only a handful of times in

the three years I did it, did the person not move.

And generally, it was if I showed up late at all,

somebody would swoop in.

There's another thing to understand about these spots, though.

Most of the food truck parking is sort of quasi-legal.

So, you know, I made friends with the local fire department because I was probably a couple of feet into

a fire hydrant.

Food trucks find space where they can.

They idle in front of hydrants, crosswalks, driveways, no parking zones.

Idling for longer than five minutes is, in and of itself, prohibited by the city.

They're constantly getting ticketed for all of this.

See, that goes a ticket, he just gave me a ticket.

They don't even, they don't wanna go over there, go check out the ticket.

How is it that New York City came to have a system where hundreds of ice cream and food trucks, more generally, are competing for spots that, even when they secure them, are not really meant to be parked in anyway?

It's time to talk about permits.

The word permit sounds boring, I know, but permits are the thing that I got totally obsessively fixated on while reporting this story.

There is a deep rabbit hole here.

I'll spare you.

The short of it is: New York City has an unregulated market for food, cart, and truck permits.

The number of permits of various types is capped at 5,000, and they officially cost $200 each.

But they can be kept basically until death, so the waitlist is thousands of people long, with only dozens or so turning over every year.

The demand so far outstrips the supply that something crazy has happened.

Vendors basically rent permits for $20,000 to $25,000 for a two-year period from the official permit holder.

It's like the taxi medallion system, except it's unregulated and the city makes no money off of it.

Another complication.

Due to a law change in the 1990s, there is only one permit officially allowed per person, despite the fact that many vendors and certainly most ice cream truck owners own multiple vehicles.

Douglas Quint, the co-owner of Big Gay Ice Cream again.

I don't know of any food truck operators, you know, in general who actually have a permit that they applied for.

Now, still at our second stop.

It's very busy in Manhattan.

I want to take all of this context about how ice cream trucks work in general and how they work in New York City specifically and apply it to understanding the conflict we started this episode with.

The one in which an upstart company called New York Ice Cream muscled Mr.

Softie out of Midtown.

The whole conflict began with some copycatting.

The owners of New York Ice Cream started out as Mr.

Softie franchisees.

They were

a group of guys who knew each other, who were working out of the same depot.

Jim Conway, the co-owner of Mr.

Softie again.

And decided that, you know, between them, they were all multi-truck owners, and that if they grouped if they grouped together then they'd have strength in numbers and they could go off on their own and

not have to be constrained by things like territories.

That was kind of their big issue that prompted them leaving our system.

What Jim is talking about here is location.

As Mr.

Softie franchisees, these guys worked a lot of Midtown corners.

And because they were so lucrative, they didn't really want to work anywhere else.

In 2009, they stopped paying their franchise fees, but they kept their corners.

Eventually, Mr.

Softie terminated their franchise agreements and the truck started to go by another name.

It's very good.

They were called Master Softie.

And they took the very familiar human ice cream cone logo and they added some sprinkles and made it a waffle cone instead of a sugar cone and said, Okay, now we're Master Softie.

And that did not fly legally.

Mr.

Softie took Master Softie to court for copyright violation.

And in 2015, won.

So MasterSoftie changed its name to New York Ice Cream, still holding onto the corners they had first as Mr.

Softie and then as Master Softie trucks, while further pushing current Mr.

Softie vendors out of the area.

And that was how things were when Andy Newman, who you just heard from again, wrote his story for the New York Times in 2017.

And it's how things remained until earlier this summer when New York Ice Cream, who declined to speak with us for this story, got caught up in a whole new ice cream brew.

Haha.

New York cops today, scooping up ice cream trucks, dozens of them, towed away and taken into custody.

The story got lots of airtime on the local news, where as you can hear, everyone got a punny kick out of another story about ice cream gone wrong.

In this case, what had gone wrong was something I mentioned earlier.

Parking.

They had discovered a unique way of avoiding being responsible for their parking debt.

That's Joseph Facito, the sheriff of New York.

Since breaking away from Mr.

Softie, New York ice cream had accrued 23,000 traffic violations worth $4.5 million in fines.

They had come up with a crafty way to avoid paying them by creating a new shell company every 90 days that effectively kept the ticketing system from finding them.

During this time, New York Ice Cream was not only not paying millions in fines of revenue to the city, it was giving itself a competitive advantage since all the other companies were paying their equivalent tickets.

In a sting dubbed Operation Meltdown, the Sheriffs of New York pulled 34 New York ice cream trucks off the street.

Did you have fun naming it Operation Meltdown?

Like, did you keep it?

The officers named it that.

We usually

come up with very creative names for our operations.

Usually they're named after Cheech and Chong movies.

I wanted this one to be Nice Dreams.

Nice Dreams is the name of a Cheech and Chang movie in which they sell drugs from an ice cream truck.

That had a connotation they'd be selling marijuana out of the trucks.

So we came with up with the officers came up with Meltdown, and that's what we went with.

By mid-summer 2019, after paying a quarter of a million dollars towards the fine, New York ice cream trucks were back on the street, working to pay down the rest of the money.

And they bring the older truck back.

Everything is okay now.

Hassan, who you heard from earlier, is a New York ice cream driver in Midtown.

Hey, about like two weeks.

Two weeks they take the older truck.

Like too many people stay at home.

Too many people not working.

But now everything is good, thank God.

But even with New York ice cream off the street for two weeks, Mr.

Softie is still not in Midtown.

At least not that I could find.

He has trucks in very busy places in Manhattan, on 23rd Street, on 68th Street, but in the 30s and 40s, it's notably absent.

Once you lose your corners, it's hard to get them back.

There is, however, another company in this space with New York ice cream.

There's only two companies that could be here.

You're going to love this.

A good piece of pipe for you.

It's the New York Ice Cream and us, the Frosty.

Frosty, Fun Time, you know, they put different names, but it's still the same company.

Matthew, who you heard from earlier, works a freezy truck in Midtown.

I asked him if Mr.

Softbeat was nearby.

No, Frosty, Softie's soft.

We took the blue pill and we're frosted.

We're frozen, baby.

What do you want to have?

Frozen or soft?

You tell me.

I will ma.

Will ma!

Yaba dabba dude.

That's what it sounds like.

You sound like

as for exactly how Freezy and New York Ice Cream came to an understanding, which they tacitly agreed to share the streets of Midtown, I have to admit, that one is still a mystery.

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Despite the conflict, despite the chaos, despite the parking tickets, the permits, and the raids, business seems to be booming, and not just on the trucks.

There are a number of companies like Big Gay Ice Cream that are trying to do something new and inventive with SoftServe.

In comparison, the Mr.

Softy style trucks are unchanging.

That's what makes them so reliable, so unfussy, but it also potentially makes them vulnerable.

I mean, this is a business that could be dramatically altered by taking credit cards.

And ice cream trucks that are everywhere, they can disappear.

It's happened before.

To hear how, let's pull into our last stop in Brooklyn.

Maria Campanello, I am the ice cream girl.

I was born into ice cream.

My father was, he was one of the Good Humor guys, original.

You know, with the hat, the white.

He wore white all his life.

I guess by the 80s, he stopped wearing the bow tie and just kept away on the white with the black belt and the black shoes, you know.

Before Mr.

Softy, there was good humor.

Good humor was founded in 1920, and you can still buy good humor bars at markets.

But good humor men and the trucks and carts they operated used to be ubiquitous.

In 1976, though, the company, citing declining profits and coming off a reputation-besmirching lawsuit in which it pled guilty to knowingly selling tainted ice cream, decided to focus on grocery stores.

It sold its fleet of trucks to distributors and individual operators.

One of these operators was Maria Campanella's father.

Her story really gets at what it's like to be an ice cream seller, to live this business, for better or worse.

I met Maria at a Greek pastry shop in Bay Ridge in South Brooklyn, where we ordered four desserts and sat in the garden in the back.

Her story is personal, so Maria is going to tell it herself.

My father started off on a bicycle for good humor, and then I think he went into the army, you know, and he got discharged because my father had bad lungs and, you know, and always had asthma attacks, heart problems, this, that, and the other thing.

So my father was a sick man, but he never stopped working.

Like, no, my father worked, he used to come home and get asthma attacks.

You know, he used to get asthma attacks on the truck, you know.

And he just kept going.

He

originally started the route on the west side of like Brooklyn, the south, south Brooklyn.

That was his territory.

That was his turf.

It was a gentleman's handshake.

They would be like, you know, Chubby, you know, or this one, that was my father's name.

You know, this is your route, I respect that.

Now they're like animals.

No.

Now they don't care.

There's no gentleman.

My mother was never an ice cream woman or anything like that, but she was behind the scenes.

You know, she raised us and she went along with everything that, you know, my father, you know, had to put her through for the truck.

He used to take me to school in his ice cream truck.

I was the coolest person, forget it.

He used to take me to college in my ice cream truck.

I used to drive it there.

I got bullied when I was young.

I was my mother's apron.

I was on her apron until I was 13, didn't cross the street on my block.

And then when

I was in junior high school, that's when I met my friends and that's when we became the worst.

Forget it, we were so bad.

And then you know i got into all this stuff you would never believe i i ran away from home

when he put me on the truck that day i said to myself how could my father put me on this truck this was his prized possession everybody loves my father why would he want me to ruin it and that day is when my whole life my whole chapter but before that i was woo forget about it

i wanted to prove to them that you know i could be somebody

I started in the 80s.

I worked everywhere.

I worked the streets.

Back then, I worked seven days a week.

I worked till one o'clock in the morning.

Now I'm sent out there.

I'm a girl.

You know what I'm saying?

I'm by myself, and I got to protect my father's route.

They weren't ready for a girl, the ice cream girl.

They weren't ready.

You know, I'm not, once you let these guys stay on your route, that's it.

They own it.

And that's when it was good.

In the 80s, it was like, it was great money.

Ice cream is universal.

It's supposed to be, but it's not.

It felt like it was in Brooklyn.

You know, I had all my good blocks, and then the other blocks were great.

Now I could ride down those blocks and I see the kids outside and they're stupid.

They don't even know I have an ice cream truck.

It's like, what is that?

An alien, an alien spaceship?

I'm like, yo, I sell ice cream over here.

I'm going to start ringing doorbells.

I have a school, you know, that I do all year round.

Candy, ice cream, chips, soda.

Yeah, but even in the winter, they buy like maybe about seven ice creams a day.

I've been there for 36 years, and my father's been there 15 years before that.

You know, he started that.

You know, like it's not a lot, but it's me, so it's enough.

I'm grateful.

You know, I'm grateful for anything.

If I go out and I make $20, I'm grateful for it.

I want to continue my father's legacy.

And the other thing I'm scared about is my ice cream truck.

It's in 1974.

And I do want a soft truck.

I could go sit on the busiest street, King's Highway, where there's so much traffic.

Let's just say, but you know, there'll be hundreds of people passing by every minute.

And they just won't buy.

You got soft?

You got soft?

You got soft?

You got soft?

No.

People stop me.

I have to stop, pull over, get into a spot, whatever.

and stand up, okay?

You know, and to come out of the truck.

Oh, I'm sorry.

I thought you got swap.

If I had a new truck, I'd be able to go more places.

My father's been selling ice cream,

and he bought a couple of trucks.

And, you know, it's so hard to buy one, you know, since he's gone.

Like, I can't do it.

It's impossible.

Like, the bills, everything went up.

It's like, I got to take care of this.

I got to take care of that.

That's what I'm worried about.

But other than that, it's okay.

Because it's my father's legacy.

I can't imagine not doing it for him anymore.

I mean, I

the past like

five years was down to the ground where like I cried all summer.

I mean July and August once school gets out.

I'm dead.

I'm dead.

I go on the army base.

That's what I wanted to tell you.

I go on the army base.

I like to stay up there and watch the sunsets because like I never had that for 30 something years.

I was in an ice cream truck all day long when I took it from my father.

He used to go out early.

He used to bring it home at 2 o'clock, you know, and that's it.

I was on that ice cream truck till late at night.

So I never saw the sunsets.

I call it my perch.

I'm all by myself on the top, you know, and people could come by ice cream, but they, you know, maybe I'll get like two or three customers in the parking lot over there.

It's right on top of the bridge.

Like my view is the whole bridge, you know.

And I'm just honored to be there.

Like that's the best thing in the world to me.

And just to, you know, like the whole sky is there, and I can talk to my mother and father, you know.

So that's a great part.

So, but anyway, I mean, I love it.

I love it.

I never want it to end.

You know, so, but, you know, you get scared, you know.

And my biggest fear was when my mother and father were alive: golf a bit if I got sick.

You know,

who would like who would drive the truck?

I'm glad that I did it till, I mean, I'm not glad they're gone, believe me, because like my father's my life, my mother's my life every single day.

I would do anything to, I would give the truck up in a second just to have them here, you know what I'm saying?

And, but,

you know, I'm glad that I fulfilled my,

I wouldn't have had it any other way.

You know?

One of the things I found so moving about Maria's story is the way it plays with time.

In her telling, a soft ice cream truck is the future.

But as I had been working on this piece, I had come to think of ice cream trucks as something from the past that had managed to stay surprisingly current, an analog business surviving in a world where everything analog seems like it's just awaiting its own disruption.

Ice cream trucks are basically gas-guzzling push carts, an old-school street vendor operation that was here before food trucks were cool and soft serve became artisanal.

This outmodedness is the reason there's so much conflict.

It's a highly competitive yet undifferentiated street business, a cash business run according to outdated, half-stated, semi-dysfunctional regulations and customs, organized around misshapen city rules and a fleet-to-fleet honor system that, like so many honor systems, isn't always honored.

But its outmodedness also means that in an increasingly stratified city, instead of having a a business plan that targets some micro niche of New Yorkers, instead of being perfectly optimized for someone, it's still for everyone, all the different kinds of people who live and visit here.

When you have a soft serve, you're eating something really messy, something delivered to you on a piece of turf made of unchanging, quickly melting ingredients and shot through with air that's sold by people working in a hot truck for dozens of hours on steamy summer days as those same trucks spew exhaust and noise into a blocked, crowded crosswalk.

If you were starting from scratch right now, you would never start with this process, these regulations, or even with this ice cream.

So, thank goodness, we're not always starting everything from scratch.

The soft serve ice cream cone is an imperfect product made by an imperfect business sold imperfectly in this imperfect city.

That still, at that serendipitous moment, you spot on Mr.

Softie on the corner, is absolutely absolutely perfect.

This is Decodering.

I'm Willa Paskin.

You can find me on Twitter at Willa Paskin.

And if you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can email us at decodering at slate.com.

If you haven't yet, please subscribe and rate our feed and Apple podcasts wherever you get your podcasts.

And even better, tell your friends.

This podcast was written by Willa Paskin and was produced and edited by Benjamin Frisch, who also does illustrations for every episode.

Cleo Levin is our research assistant.

Thanks to Anna McGorman, David Favarolo, Jim Middleton, Matthew Shapiro, Tom Skoka, June Thomas, Oded Shankar, Michael Lanza, Hilary Guissard, Max Yeager, Ranjan Roy, and everyone else who gave us help and feedback along the way.

Thanks for listening.

Just a quick programming note.

We'll be back in October.

Have a great summer.

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