#10 How a FREE GIFT Built a Multi-million Dollar Business

Issue #10 — Wednesday, June 13, 2018

http://dennyhatch.blogspot.com/2018/06/10-how-free-gift-built-multi-million.html

Posted by Denny Hatch

How a FREE GIFT Built a Multi-million Dollar Business

When I was growing up, driving in the hot summer without car air conditioning was something you got used to.

Imagine a family of five or six on vacation driving across the South Dakota Badlands in 110-degree heat with no air conditioning!

In 1931 at the height of the Great Depression, a young pharmacy graduate and his wife arrived in the tiny town of Wall, South Dakota—“the geographical center of nowhere.”

With $3,000, Ted and Dorothy Hustead opened a drug store on Main Street. They agreed if they could not make a go of the business within five years, they would bag it and try something else.

Wall was on the main road to a great tourist attraction—the Mount Rushmore Monument—56 miles away.

But day after day, season after season, the Husteads watched cars driving through town. Virtually nobody stopped.

        

Dorothy Hits the Jackpot

One scorching day in 1936 Dorothy Hustead had a drop-dead brilliant idea: put signs along the highway offering free ice water

        

Ted apparently did not think much of his wife’s brainstorm, but he was willing to try anything. According to Hustead family lore, when Ted got back from putting up the first signs, cars were already lined up out front with thirsty tourists taking advantage of the free offer.

Wall Drug instantly became a legendary stopping-off place. It now serves up to 20,000 travelers a day. As Ronald MacArthur wrote in a January 1988 issue of The International Herald Tribune:

Although its name signifies a drugstore, it’s unlike any drugstore anywhere else in the world. It’s a museum, restaurant (with authentic buffalo burgers), pharmacy, jewelry store, camping outfitter, soda fountain, tourist information center, Indian-book store, Western souvenir shop, Western art gallery (with 150 paintings), cowboy boot and Indian moccasin shop, and Western wear and equipment store, all wrapped into one.

When Ted figured out customers came to Wall Drug as a result of roadside signs, every visitor was given a sign to hang in the local community. Signs sprouted all over the U.S., Canada and Mexico.

South Dakota GIs serving overseas used to request signs, and soon Wall Drug was famous all over Europe and the Far East.

Thanks to the Husteads, Wall, SD has more swimming pools per capita than any other U.S. locale!

Takeaway to Consider

“Always try to convert a marketing disaster into a marketing opportunity.” 
—Lester Wunderman, The Wunderman Agency

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Word count: 401

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