POPS — one year later

One year ago today, POPS on Route 66 in Arcadia, Okla., opened its doors for the first time.

The convenience store/restaurant was the brainchild of Cheseapeake Energy CEO Aubrey McClendon and architect Rand Elliott, complete with a 66-foot-tall soda bottle festooned with multicolored LED lights and hundreds of brands of cold soda on sale.

POPS had big ideas, and now it can be reported that it drew big interest from the public. Some snippets of information on its first anniversary:

• POPS has sold about 600,000 bottles of soda. With each selling for $1.50 or $2, that’s more than $1 million in gross sales from soda alone. UPDATE: I was informed later today that POPS was projecting just 175,000 bottles sold in the first year.
• POPS serves an average of 1,000 customers daily.
• POPS has been featured on the “Today Show,” MSNBC, CNN and CBS television and Food & Wine and Travel + Leisure magazines. It will appear in the May 2009 issue of Southern Living Magazine.
• POPS has seen customers from nearly every state, plus Spain, Germany, China, Japan and Australia.

POPS cited its vast soda selection as a big reason for its success.

“It’s been amazing to see the lines that form in front of the cooler doors,” said Marty Doepke, POPS general manager.  “The soda definitely draws people in, and once they are here, they really feel a sense of nostalgia when they discover sodas they haven’t seen in years, some that even remind them of their parents or grandparents.”

POPS stocks nearly 600 types of sodas in the cooler and offers guests a touchscreen kiosk where they can hand-pick from more than 700 sodas and have them shipped anywhere in the United States.

“According to our distributors, we have the largest retail selection of bottled soda in the U.S.,” said Doepke.

It’s hard to go wrong when a Texan who’s hankering for a Dublin Dr Pepper, or a southwestern Illinois native who wants a Ski soda, can both gain satisfaction at the same place on Route 66 in small-town Oklahoma.

And Route 66ers should be grateful to POPS for showing that there’s abundant life in the old road yet.