Closing for the season, ice cream shop was good to the very last scoop
New London — Berry’s Ice Cream & Candy Bar was down to about eight flavors by Sunday afternoon, the last day the store would be open this year. There was plenty of pumpkin pie and gingerbread, but the jars of chocolate peanut butter and strawberry cheesecake were nearly scraped down to the bottom.
“This is it,” said Jackie Jaskiewicz, a Berry’s employee who spent the afternoon scooping heavily discounted dairy.
All she had for sale was what was left after the last of the weekly batches from Lisbon’s Wildowsky Dairy arrived at the store, the ice cream slowly dwindling as the temperature outside dropped and the ice cream season came to a close.
No new ice cream would roll into Berry’s until March, she said.
“We purposely haven’t put in the (new) order, because we literally can’t get rid of all of it,” Jaskiewicz said.
Anything left over by the end of the day Sunday would be eaten by employees, so each year Berry’s, which opened in 2014, hosts a blowout sale to empty the ice cream reserves in the store. A scoop on Sunday was $1. Normally $10, a pint was $8. Toppings were free.
Darlene Davis, who said she is a friend of Berry’s owner Laura Beckham, was stocking up on pumpkin pie and gingerbread ice cream to bring back to her Quaker Hill home for the holidays. Davis’ brother, famous for his sweet tooth, was planning to come visit over the Christmas holiday and she needed to keep the freezer stocked. She walked out with a pint filled with both flavors.
“I wanted to get the last scoop of the season,” Davis said.
Berry’s has stayed open into mid-December in previous years, Beckham said, but the late closing date stopped making good business sense.
“It gets so dark so early and it does remain cold, and kids are still in school, so it really just comes to a halt,” she said.
The end-of-season sale is Beckham’s way of thanking the regular customers who keep coming to Berry’s even after the weather outside starts to feel more like the freezer in the shop.
“It’s just nice to be able to hand basically free ice cream to people who are clearly coming in because they love the place,” she said.
On Sunday, Jaskiewicz said she planned to keep sending ice cream out the door, and would close up shop for the last time until the spring when it was all gone.
Just three hours after Berry’s opened Sunday at 1 p.m., the lights were out.