Selling Italian Ice in Boston – A One Shot Story

Sales culture is one of the most distinctive traits of American anthropology.

The foundations of modern marketing strategies date back to forerunners such as P.T. Barnum’s ‘have a little something for everybody’ slogan and Edward Bernays, the father of public relations. It is ingrained in popular culture phenomena such as garage sales, lemonade stands ran by kids and jokes about used cars salesmen.  Sales culture is also paired with customer (not consumer) culture, as in the ubiquitous mantra ‘customer is king’, which ‘shapes’ people’s attitudes in terms of demanding fairness and a proper ‘bang for the bucks’.

When it comes to selling, creativity knows no limit and, from Big Tech to local shops and streets’ food carts, it often relies on stereotypes and exoticism. This is particularly true, and we’re finally getting to the point, of food and beverage which is still, but I don’t know for how long, an Italian landmark.

The last time I checked, I could not find any information about Italy exporting ice to the USA. As a residual hypothesis, I cannot rule out the possibility that someone may use imported still water to make ice cubes, but to be honest, I think it is unlikely. That’s why I still can’t understand where this ‘Italian ice’ came from, other than the brilliant imagination of a Boston businessman.

p.s. A comment from a reader of this post points out that ‘Italian Ice’ is a real product and not the result of a marketing strategy. So I owe this Boston businessman an apology, although I did praise his ingenuity nonetheless, and  the history of Italian immigration in the USA a better attention.

After releasing my mistake I thought about removing this post, but eventually I decided to keep it, because it is a paradigmatic example of how a photograph is the mind of the photographer and does not exist in reality. I am a big fan of Bergson’s (attributed) quote: the eye sees what the mind is prepared to comprehend. In this picture, my mind was not ready to understand what the eye was seeing, so I built an entire argument to give sense to the image, without actually making sense.

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