A soda shop, also often known as a malt shop, known as a “malted shop” in Canada, is a business akin to an ice cream parlor, and a drugstore soda fountain. Interiors were often furnished with a large mirror behind a marble counter with goose-neck soda spouts, plus spinning stools, round marble-topped tables, and wireframe sweetheart chairs.
History
The counter-service soda fountain was introduced in 1903, and around that same time, drugstores began to attract noontime customers by adding sandwiches and light lunches. The beverage menu at a soda shop usually included ice cream sodas , chocolate malts, fountain colas, and milkshakes. A 1915 issue of Soda Fountain magazine stated: "The soda fountain of today is an ally of temperance... Ice cream soda is a greater medium for the cause of temperance than all the sermons ever preached on that subject."
During the 1930s and 1940s, the jukeboxes in such establishments made them popular gathering spots for teenagers, as noted in the 1940s song "Jukebox Saturday Night" : Pop Tate's Chocklit Shoppe is a fictional soda shop created by Bob Montana as a setting for the characters in his Archiecomic books and comic strips. Tate's soda fountain was based on real-life locations frequented by teenagers in Haverhill, Massachusetts, during the 1930s—Crown Confectionery and the Chocolate Shop on Merrimack Street and the Tuscarora on Winter Street. The character of Pop Tate was inspired by the Greek immigrant owners of these Haverhill soda shops. In the years 1936 to 1939, when Montana went to high school in Haverhill, he would join his friends at the Chocolate Shop counter and make sketches on napkins. A decade prior to Archie, the Sugar Shop was a hangout for the teenagers in Carl Ed's comic stripHarold Teen. Soda shops are often used as settings in films and TV shows. In The Twilight Zone's "Walking Distance" episode, a soda shop serves as a framing device and is a link to the past for Martin Sloan. The popular TV showHappy Days took place in two main sets: the protagonist's home and a soda shop. They appear in the movies Harold Teen, Orson Welles' The Stranger, Has Anybody Seen My Gal?, Pleasantville and others. The gang from Scooby-Doo are often seen frequenting a malt shop. A malt shop also plays a key point in Blast from the Past, reflecting changes in the surface world while the main characters are underground unaware of what has happened. The protagonist of the young adultscience fiction novelHave Spacesuit Will Travel by Robert A. Heinlein works in a drug-store, soda fountain. In the Scooby-Doo cartoons, the Malt Shop is the favourite hangout spot for the Mystery Inc gang, they often go there when they're going over their plans to solve the mystery and when they have finished the mystery, while Scooby and Shaggy typically indulge their eating habits.
