The legend behind the drugstore, restaurant and shopping arcade on the I90 is that it was set up in the 1930s and wasn’t really making a go of it until the lady behind the business had an idea. They started advertising ‘Free iced water’ and that pulled in the hot tired thirsty crowds which had formerly kept on going East or West.
And having discovered the power of advertising Wall Drug has never looked back. The first billboard I saw said that there were 391 miles to go to Wall Drug and they came thick and fast after that. The billboards advertised coffee at 5 cents, the bookstore, the fact that Wall Drug has been mentioned in newspapers all over the world, its kid-friendly atmosphere, its home-made donuts and its pies.
And as the miles tick down there was a growing feeling of inevitability that I was going to stop. How could one not want to take a peek?
Really, I didn’t want even a peek. I wanted to head into the Badlands National Park as soon as possible and see whether I could see bison, pronghorn, prairie dog townships and burrowing owls. I didn’t really want to stop and I didn’t want to see some tacky shopping emporium. But I did want breakfast and there was a bit of me that wanted to reward Wall Drug for all the effort that it had put into enticing me with hundreds of roadside billboards.
But I would only stop for a few minutes. Just enough time for a quick bite to eat. I stayed an hour and a half.
I think I made a good choice having cherry pie and coffee for breakfast as the cooked food looked a bit average, and then I could have got away, but I lingered and browsed and bought some books about local wildlife, looked at the western paintings (which range from the kitsch to the stylish), looked at the photos from the 1880s of sad- or proud- (or sad and proud) looking indians and ambitious-looking European Americans.
I could have played one-armed bandits, bought rocks or gems, a cowboy hat and a host of other things.
So I spent time and money at Wall Drug. They got me, as they get so many people wih their billboard advertising and 80 foot tall plastic model of a dinosaur. I don’t begrudge them the time or money, and I enjoyed the cherry pie and coffee. But I’ll think of Wall Drug the next time someone tells me that they don’t pay any attention to adverts. Of course, neither do I, except I would never have stopped for that cherry pie and coffee, and bought those books, if there had been a single sign saying ‘Cafe’, or even a single sign saying ‘Delicious cherry pie made as the English like it’.
And the two blocks by two blocks that is Wall Drug must have sucked money away from other localities nearby – surely? Maybe Midland would have more people in it still if Wall Drug hadn’t hit on the simple idea of advertising free iced water. But that’s capitalism and a free market for you – winners and losers, and you can’t really argue with that.
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