USA: South Dakota, Wall – Wall Drug Store

🪧 Free Ice Water and Five Hundred Billboards: Wall Drug Store

We’d been driving for what felt like several geological epochs across the vast, featureless expanse of South Dakota when the signs started appearing. Not one or two signs. Hundreds of them. Dozens of miles apart at first, then closer together, like a drumroll building to a punchline. “Wall Drug — 250 Miles.” “Wall Drug — 180 Miles.” “Wall Drug — Free Ice Water.” By the time we actually arrived, we felt we’d been in a relationship with the place for years.

That, as it turns out, is rather the point.

Wall Drug Store sits in the small town of Wall, South Dakota, a settlement of around 800 souls that exists primarily, one suspects, because of the shop itself. The store has become one of the great American roadside attractions — a mandatory pull-off along the I-90 corridor for anyone heading towards Badlands National Park or trundling on to Mount Rushmore. More than 2 million people a year stop here, which is extraordinary when you consider there isn’t a great deal else going on in the surrounding landscape.

The story of how it got there is genuinely rather good.

In 1931, at the absolute nadir of the Great Depression — a period when a third of American banks had collapsed, unemployment was nudging 25%, and the general mood was, shall we say, not upbeat — a young pharmacist named Ted Hustead made what most sensible people would have considered a catastrophic decision. He bought the only drugstore in Wall for $3,000, a sum he’d inherited from his father. Wall was, at the time, a dusty, remote little town with no particular reason to exist. There was no passing trade to speak of, no tourist economy, nothing. Just wind, prairie, and a great deal of nothing in every direction.

Ted and his wife Dorothy gave themselves five years. If it hadn’t worked by 1936, they’d call it a day and do something sensible with their lives.

1936 arrived. It hadn’t worked. They were broke, tired, and ready to quit.

Then Dorothy had a thought.

It was a blistering summer’s day — South Dakota summers are not gentle affairs; the temperature regularly climbs past 100°F — and Dorothy was lying down for a rest while the heat hammered the roof. She could hear the cars on the highway outside. Route 16A it was then, long before the Interstate system was even a gleam in Eisenhower’s eye. Families were driving past in their sweltering tin-box automobiles, windows down, children presumably melting, and Dorothy thought: those people would absolutely murder someone for a cold drink right now.

So she suggested they put up a few signs on the highway offering free ice water.

Ted knocked together some boards, painted them up, and stuck them out along the road. Within the hour, the shop was rammed. By the end of that first day, the Husteads had served 300 cars. The drugstore that had been slowly dying was suddenly, improbably, alive.

What followed was one of the more inspired marketing campaigns in American commercial history — and one that cost, initially, almost nothing. The Husteads kept adding signs. Then more signs. Then signs along other roads. Then signs in other states. Today, Wall Drug operates more than 300 paid-for billboards, strung along roughly 650 miles of I-90 alone, with others scattered further afield — and we do mean further afield. There are Wall Drug signs in Amsterdam, in Kenya, in Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, and reportedly on a few Antarctic research stations, which suggests either a very dedicated marketing team or a traveller with too much luggage space and a sense of humour.

We are, it has to be said, complete suckers for a good marketing campaign. The signs work on us every single time. We have pulled off I-90 at Wall on every occasion we’ve passed — which, given how many times we’ve driven through South Dakota, is more often than we’d care to admit to anyone who knows us. There’s something almost Pavlovian about it. We see the sign, we indicate, we exit. It can’t be helped.

The store itself has expanded rather dramatically since Dorothy’s lightbulb moment. What began as a single small-town pharmacy in 1931 now covers 50,000 square feet of retail, dining, and general American exuberance. There’s a restaurant, a chapel, a Western art gallery, an animatronic T-Rex in the car park (obviously), and enough Western-themed merchandise to keep a small country in cowboy hats for a decade.

And the ice water? Still free. The coffee is still 5 cents, which in an era of £6 flat whites is either charmingly nostalgic or making the rest of the hospitality industry look absolutely ridiculous.

Probably both.