Something I never thought too much about, until last weekend, was how many mopeds and scooters you see riding around when you go to the beach. Now, the ice cream scooter is popping up all over!
Mopeds and scooters are a hot topic lately, and with gasoline prices rising as they are, it’s hard to ignore them. They’re all over the place now.
Normally they don’t gather any attention. In the parking lot next to the hotel we stayed at in Myrtle Beach, two enterprising businesses used their mopeds to maximize their profits. This ice cream scooter guy gathered a lot of customers on a hot day there, but he wasn’t the only business there riding mopeds and scooters.
First it was the police. Not riding a police motorcycle , but instead a yellow scooter. He came quietly buzzing into the parking lot, like a bee, going from car to car to see if their parking time had expired. About half the cars in the lot got tickets from him. Over and over, he propped the scooter up on the center stand, flipped open the seat, took out his ticket pad, and started writing. It was an efficient operation by the City of Myrtle Beach for sure. On the other hand, he sure didn’t show the authority that riding a Harley-Davidson Police Special would have shown.
The second one was an ice cream scooter. There are actually two ice cream scooters around there now. One has a trailer and the other has a box on the back seat. Just like the ice cream trucks, they blast that annoying jack-in-the-box sounding music to get all the kids to start running and jumping up and down until their parents get get out their wallets. He would come into the parking lot, what seemed to be about 10 or more times a day, maybe more, on his moped. He’d prop it up on the center stand, and turn up the music. On the back was a cooler with a 3 or 4 foot tall plastic ice cream cone sticking up in the air. You couldn’t miss it. That was the problem.
Over and over, day after day, that moped scooter sound and music started to get on my nerves. Even my kids were saying, oh no, here he comes again! I don’t know where we rode off to to replenish his stock, but that cooler seemed like a bottomless pit of ice cream bars. I give him a lot of credit though, that scooter cost him practically nothing to run, was easy to place where ever he wanted to set up, and was very kid-friendly.
It’s easy to imagine more businesses and municipalities making clever use of mopeds and scooters to decrease their spending on fuel, especially in tourist areas and in cities. Pizza delivery would be a good one too. Each day we got about 5 different ads slipped under our door from pizza shops. I don’t know what they pay those kids to deliver pizzas, but I can’t imagine how much they have to spend on high priced gas just to try to make a few bucks in tips.
For more about mopeds, scooters, maxi scooters and motorcyles, come visit us at Motorcycle Information . We may not have much more about an ice cream scooter , but then again, you never know.
