The Schwan's Man
Schwan’s is going out of business. You’re probably thinking “hey, that doesn’t matter at all,” and you’re completely right. Bang on. Couldn’t have said it better myself. This isn’t gonna be one of those poignant posts where the secret theme is me having depression. I don’t have enough time to get wistful about some company I have no financial stake in. But I got lots of time to reflect on stuff that doesn’t matter at all. I love shit like that.
Schwan’s was a frozen food delivery service. Started in the ‘50s in Minnesota, selling ice cream. They eventually branched out into frozen meals. Bags of mixed vegetables, chicken pot pies, pizza, fish sticks. A bunch of wholesome, family friendly food of suspect nutritional value. If you remember them, it’s because of their big yellow trucks. They’d drive around the neighborhood, real slow, the delivery man would come to your door with a checklist, you’d check the items you wanted, then he’d bring it to your door.
They’re going out of business because their business sounds like something you’d see in The Wonder Years, where kids ride bikes around Burbank and wonder if the United States government is going to murder them in Vietnam. It’s the most midcentury business of all time. Nuclear families and TV dinners.
There’s no secretly interesting corporate history of Schwan’s and I have no liminal space death of retail fixation on it like I did with Kmart. It was just a 1950s thing you could participate in as part of your “I have a family and a house and everything’s normal” starter kit. The fact that it lasted until 2024 is wild. They even rebranded as YELLOH to sound like they could exist at the same time as the internet, which is very “elderly pastor namechecking Pokemon in his sermon.”
And yet I think about Schwan’s a lot. Maybe it’s because my youngest brother is a Gen Zer and the difference between 1988 and 2007 boggles the mind. I grew up with a rotary phone. He was messing around with my iPhone when he was still in a stroller. I looked at movie showtimes in a newspaper. He can just torrent them in five seconds and cast them to his giant television. I remember when “Donald Trump” was just a crazy TV guy who was always threatening to run for president and actually did once now that I think about it so forget that one. Anyway I’m lying, the generational difference is kinda cosmetic and whenever people do that bit for real it always winds up being about phones. I met a guy once who grew up when cars were new but he figured them out fine. Even figured out how to drive them and drink at the same time.
(It’s always a hoot to see tech perverts talk about the amazing gizmos we have now, how people from olden times must think we’re gods or demons. Reminds me of when academics tried to explain the moon landing to remote tribes and the remote tribes were like “oh damn, you guys are wizards, now give me a gun, you said if I came to your stupid thing you’d give me a gun.”)
So the generational difference thing isn’t part of it. That’s just a way to pat yourself on the back for the random number generator that constitutes your birthdate. But I do think it’s interesting how long you could get away with 1950s cosplay and that Schwan’s managed to be part of the fabric of my childhood. Their ice cream was good, but it wasn’t that good. And I don’t miss it because now you can buy gelato at the gas station.
And it’s interesting that I was obsessed with the Schwan’s man even though I didn’t care about the product at all. I probably associated him with family stability – if my dad orders stuff we don’t need from the Schwan’s man, it’s proof my dad didn’t get fired. If we were eating ice cream, that meant there was more ice cream in the freezer. But that doesn’t explain why I’d get all freaked out whenever the dude came over and I’d run outside to take pictures of the truck on a Polaroid camera. Why I wanted to know all about the job and would ask him work questions. I mean, I even wanted to do ridealongs, shadow him.
The easy answer is just that it was kid brain: I liked the sunny yellow trucks. I liked seeing them move. I’d draw them in my free time, recreate them with LEGOs.
But I also liked that if they were stopping at peoples’ houses, something good was happening. I understood it. That’s the deeper thing that goes beyond kid brain, the thing that’s still in me. I understood that someone was getting paid to deliver food, which everybody needs, to people who could afford it. That was a job I could grasp. It was work in the purest sense. A guy did labor that provided tangible worth for his customers. I could do that job.
To this day I don’t really know what my dad did for a living. He was a house insurance adjuster. There was lots of paperwork, he was never home, and never happy. He complained about contractors a lot. That was one kind of work, a kind I didn’t think I could do. But here was something like what my grandpa did. He hauled oil from Bakersfield to Los Angeles. Makes sense. Oil makes cars work. Got it. This was the same thing but with ice cream instead of poison.
Try as I might, that’s still how I’m wired. I sift through dozens of job descriptions a day without comprehending word one. All written in a foreign language, inaccessible, closed-off forever. The ones that pay actual money, which is probably not a coincidence. The white collar economy and being part of it is something that fundamentally baffles me. But I can drive a truck and I can swing a hammer. I can move things from one place to another place. That sounds true and honest. And it’s part of why I write, to work through my confusion, to approach understanding and own up to my need to figure all this shit out that feels beyond me.
The Schwan’s man came until all the kids got grown. The time when our life was structured such that we could use his services had ended. It was sad to see him go but really just because it was one less guy my dad could have friendly conversations with, conversations that had no risk of going sideways because they weren’t about unsolvable problems. One of the last times he showed up, he gave me something he got for his 20th anniversary with the company. Imagine that, 20 years at one company and they pay you the whole time. Unbelievable. I’m sick with jealousy.
The thing he gave me was a little model of their first round of yellow trucks. A ‘50s Dodge. I loved that damn thing and looked at it all the time. I still keep it on my shelf as a reminder of valuing honest work even if it’s silly and irrelevant, of keeping the equation of society simple. It’s a truck and you do your job with it. It’s a Dodge. Merle Haggard always said they were more reliable than Fords and Chevys. Says the company’s in Marshall, Minnesota. I’ve never been to Minnesota and all I really know is it gets cold in Minnesota. In the winter I guess you’d need to wear a coat.