11/8/2023 0 Comments Mr softee truckFor him, it’s cruelly appropriate that the ice-cream truck, a classic slice of Americana, would be ruined in the storm. “It’s like a microcosm of what happened to everybody all the way down to a dude with an ice-cream truck,” Sparks said. What happened to Sparks is an illustration of how the landscape has shifted for foreign businesses in China since current president Xi Jinping has taken over the country, and the climate has become considerably less hospitable for foreign business - small ones, in particular. with just enough money to reinvent his life as a New York stand-up comic. Two years ago, Sparks sold off all his trucks and moved back to the U.S. Instead of the expansion he had planned, Sparks got an implosion. He planned an ambitious expansion, and lined up investors to back it: He wanted to quintuple his fleet to 50 trucks, add more storefronts, and move into new territory. “All these trucks were just going nuts, doing really well. During one corporate party at Bosch, an international electronics company, he sold $9,000 worth of $1 cones in just two hours.Ĭompetition was scarce, because he essentially invented the Suzhou ice-cream-truck market. He did local TV and newspaper interviews and was a fixture at school and corporate events, where he and his team doled out waffle-cone soft-serve to thousands. Five years later, Sparks had built up his Mister Softee operation to ten trucks and 25 employees. He started with one truck in 2007 with the help of Alex Conway, grandson of Mister Softee’s co-founder and Sparks’s old University of Miami roommate. Just a few years ago, Turner Sparks was a minor celebrity in Suzhou, where the English teacher turned entrepreneur was adored for bringing New York’s iconic Mister Softee trucks for the first time to China.
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