Wall Drug: How Free Ice Water Built an Empire

In December of nineteen thirty-one, Ted Hustead paid three thousand dollars for the only drugstore in Wall, South Dakota, a town of about three hundred people on the edge of the Badlands. He and his wife Dorothy moved from Nebraska and spent the next five years watching almost no one walk through the door.

The summer of nineteen thirty-six was punishingly hot. Dorothy was trying to sleep one afternoon when she heard the cars rolling past on Highway Sixteen, the main route across South Dakota. She listened to them pass and thought about how hot those people must be, driving across the prairie before car air-conditioning existed. She came up with an idea: offer free ice water, and put up signs along the highway telling people it was waiting for them.

Ted drove out that afternoon and hammered the first signs into the ground. By the time he returned, the parking lot had cars in it.

He kept expanding the signs. By the nineteen fifties, billboards for Wall Drug appeared across South Dakota and into neighboring states. By the nineteen sixties, signs appeared in Europe, promoted by American soldiers stationed there. A sign went up near the South Pole, put there by a scientist with a sense of humor. The Wall Drug sign network became a piece of American folklore.

The store today covers seventy-six thousand square feet and receives up to twenty thousand visitors a day in peak summer. Coffee still costs five cents a cup. Ice water is still free.

Dorothy Hustead's idea, conceived in a hot bedroom in a depression-era small town on a highway nobody was stopping on, became the marketing case study that every roadside business in America eventually gets compared to.