Ok, who remembers The Pop Shoppe? I’m sure most 35+ year old’s in Canada remember and a lot of people growing up on the East Coast probably remember too. Not only was The Pop Shoppe’s slogan ahead of its time but their ideas for running a Jubbling business were too.

The Pop Shoppe soda bottler started in Canada in 1969 and attempted to compete with Coca Cola, Pepsi and others with a new business model – open a soda shop that sells directly to customers and do it with a “twist”. The twist was that after you made your first soda purchase in the distinctive Pop Shoppe bottles, you would bring them back for a inexpensive refill. It was a definite “preemptive Jubbling” because their bottles never had to be sorted, crushed, and reduced for recycling. And by not flavor-labeling their bottles and offering a discount for bottle returns, The Pop Shoppe was able to reuse their bottles repeatedly. At their peak, The Pop Shoppe had 30 different soda flavors that included lime rickey, strawberry, pineapple, and my favorite, black cherry. The only downside of not flavor-labeling their bottles was that when you got home, you had to pick your soda by color and just hope you didn’t grab a cream soda. [Note: If I did grab a cream soda, i just put the cap back on and put the bottle into the case. Sorry bro's.]

As a kid, finding an empty Pop Shoppe bottle on the side of the road was like discovering gold because you knew you could get it refilled at rate that a 9 year old could afford. The bottles were also a kid commodity that could be traded between friends for something else of value like a spent shell casing, firecrackers or toward a wristrocket. To use a prison analogy, the Pop Shoppe bottles were a commodity as hot as cigarettes.

The Pop Shoppe’s success didn’t hinge on Jubbling alone; they sold directly to their customers and avoided the middleman – grocery stores. But it was grocery stores that eventually put them out of business in the early 80’s by producing their own soda brands at prices that The Pop Shoppe couldn’t compete with.

In 2002, Canadian businessman Brian Alger bought the rights to the Pop Shoppe brand and has been “nostalgia” marketing its products to the public since. Unfortunately he hasn’t brought back the returnable/refillable bottle idea and Pop Shoppe sodas are available in only select retailers across the U.S. and Canada. I wonder if Mr. Alger’s motivation for “not” bringing back the refillable bottles has something to do with a bunch of 40+ year olds who are sitting on a gold mine of old Pop Shoppe bottles that they’re waiting to re-fill and didn’t trade in time.

The Pop Shoppe idea is slowly coming back as we try to reduce packaging and the amount we have to recycle. You’ll find the idea with refillable cat litter, laundry detergent, bulk foods etc. – now is a great time to move in this direction. We’re so accustomed to buying over-packaged products when it’s not necessary. Imagine if gasoline was only sold in grocery stores; we wouldn’t think of purchasing it any other way and after filling our tanks, we’d throw throw away the container it was packaged in. Now, think of how much more Jubbling it would be if we could purchase everything in reusable, refillable, easy to store containers.