Hills Bros. Coffee Ad – September 20, 1951

I stop in at the Dunkin’ Donuts on Leavitt Road every few days, and I see a lot of Cappuccino Blasts® being sold, as well as any number of frozen drinks topped with whipped cream. Yesterday, the person in front of me ordered twelve bucks worth of drinks that looked like chocolate sodas. 

Indeed, the top three best selling drinks at Dunkin' Donuts nationally are the hot caramel macchiato, the caramel iced coffee and hazelnut iced coffee. (Gee, I thought coffee was something you had with dessert. It’s not supposed to be the dessert!)

Anyway, I’m beginning to wonder: doesn’t anybody drink plain old coffee anymore?

Which leads me to the topic of today’s post, namely a classic plain old coffee – Hills Brothers Coffee to be exact. I’ve written about it before (here), as it was my parents’ favorite coffee for many years.

The ad below for the classic brew ran in the Lorain Journal on September 20, 1951.

It’s an interesting ad, stressing the social aspect of drinking coffee. The pitch is that you can ‘make friends’ serving Hill Bros. Coffee because of its ‘friendlier flavor.’

Uh-huh.

That sales angle would never fly now. Tastes change, and people drink what they like. The old-time coffees such as Maxwell House, Chase & Sanborn, etc. probably enjoy minuscule market shares compared to Starbucks or Dunkin’ (even if I don’t see anyone buying just plain coffee there).

And many of the social opportunities where you might drink coffee – such as the after-tennis get together depicted in the ad – have probably gone away in the last seventy years as well, resulting in coffee drinking becoming a largely singular experience: something you drink to wake up.