Take a lesson, kids: You can fight Big Popsicle.
Popsicle is one of those words that’s surprisingly trademarked, even though it feels like it’s been in the genericized trademark zone for decades now.
The Popsicle brand has been around since the 1920s, delighting generation after generation with a dessert that’s not quite as good as any of the other frozen desserts but still has its time and place.
From the beginning, Popsicles came in conjoined sets of two: two pops, two wooden sticks, connected by a flat strip of more frozen flavored ice. So why the change to one stick in 1986?
The official word, as stated in the breaking news story on this topic in no less than the “New York Times”, was the double stick created too much of a mess . . . kids couldn’t lick both sides fast enough. Market research with moms found they widely preferred a single-stick version for the sake of the clean up.
And things stayed that way for decades until the randomness of the universe struck in May of 2019, when Justin Bieber . . . born in 1994, eight years after Popsicle eliminated the double stick . . . posted a tweet lamenting how it was impossible to find a double-sticked Popsicle.
Popsicle seized on the PR opportunity, as businesses do these days when the social media winds blow favorably upon them, and turned it into a challenge: If they received 100,000 retweets, they’d permanently bring back a line of double-sticked Popsicles.
Their tweet just passed that threshold, and on March 20th of last year . . . just when everyone was totally focused on what was going on in the ice pop industry and had no other, more pressing issues on their minds . . . they brought back double-sticked Popsicles.
The double-sticked Popsicles are still on sale today.
