Ice Cream Trucks

[Agrippina]

Where in the world do ice cream trucks refill of ice cream and other goodies? Where do ice creams "park" for the night? Is there a place ice cream drivers go to get their truck, like bus drivers do with school buses?

[Chas.E]

Oh man, I used to live in an artists loft in downtown LA, right next to the ice cream truck yard. All hours of the day and evening, those ice cream truck speakers blared their shrieking music as the trucks came to load and unload, it used to drive me crazy. At the end of every day, they hosed out their trucks and the rancid milk mixture ran down the gutters. The sidewalk and street were blackened from constant exposure to streams of drying milk, and the area reeked with a fetid stink of puddles of rotten milk. Yech.
I could probably write a book about the ice cream truck yard.

[ZenBeam]

I drove an ice cream truck the summer of 1982 (Penguin Ice Cream!). The "home port" was in a light industrial area near a freeway near Detroit. Some of them were parked inside the garage area (the ones with battery operated refrigerators). The other ones were parked real close together to make it harder to get into them overnight. Once in a while there were problems with break-ins, but not often.

We'd load up with ice cream in the morning; we never had to refill during the day. They had a huge walk-in freezer full of ice cream. I don't know how often they restocked that.

I kept track of hours spent and money made, and it came out to $2.35 / hour (how do I still remember this?), well below minumum wage. And I had one of the better routes. One guy there was really into it, though. He bought his own truck the summer I was there, and went independent, although he still bought ice cream there.