History
Carvel was founded and run by Tom Carvel for its first 60 years. In 1929, Carvel borrowed $15 from his future wife Agnes and used it to build and began operating an ice cream truck. Over Memorial Day weekend of 1934, Carvel's truck suffered a flat tire in Hartsdale, New York, Carvel started selling his custard at the site of the breakdown, the parking lot of a pottery store. Within two days, his entire stock, much of it partly melted, had been sold, and Carvel realized that both a fixed location and soft (as opposed to hard) frozen desserts were potentially good business ideas. In his first year there, he grossed over $3500. By 1937 he had a custard stand at the Hartsdale site, with a freezer which allowed him to make his own frozen custard. By 1939, gross was over $6000. The original Hartsdale store was closed on Sunday, October 5, 2008.
In the early 1940s, Tom Carvel traveled, selling custard at carnivals, while his wife Agnes ran the Hartsdale location. During World War II he ran the ice cream stands at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, gaining additional expertise in refrigeration technology. He soon invented and patented his own freezer, the "Custard King", and in 1947 sold 71 freezers at $2,900 each. Some of the freezer purchasers defaulted on payments on the units, and upon investigation, Carvel found that they were not running their businesses efficiently, choosing poor locations and not always maintaining high health standards. Carvel decided that the best way to correct the situation was to participate in running the operations of his freezer customers; he later claimed this led him to develop the concept of franchising.
Read more about this topic: Carvel (restaurant)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“... all big changes in human history have been arrived at slowly and through many compromises.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)
“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“In front of these sinister facts, the first lesson of history is the good of evil. Good is a good doctor, but Bad is sometimes a better.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)