评论
打印
The freezer aisle of a major supermarket is a cutthroat place to stake a claim: the product, after all, is frozen water, so no retailer in its right mind is going to stock competing brands. Relationships with major retailers are king, and when The Ice Co didn't have them, it bought up the companies that did (most notably Polarcube, in 1997, which unlocked the coveted Asda account). A move into a new facility in 2006 allowed the growing company to move its production line into the 21st century – ice is now escorted through it by robots, untouched by human hand – and to solve the perennial problem of cold storage. Ice, unsurprisingly, is a seasonal product, and the laborious task of building up enough stock to survive the summer begins months ahead of time.
大型超市的冰柜是一个竞争激烈的地方：毕竟产品是冷冻水，所以没有哪个头脑正常的零售商会储备竞争对手的品牌。和大型零售商搞好关系就是王道，The Ice Co在不具备这种关系时，它会去收购那些具备这种关系的公司(其中最著名的是1997年收购Polarcube，它打开了令人垂涎的阿斯达超市的份额)。2006年，这家成长中的公司搬到了新工厂，使其生产线进入21世纪的标准——冰块现在由机器人护送，不受人工影响，并解决了长期存在的冷藏问题。没错，冰块属于季节性产品，而建立足够的库存以迎合夏季的大量需求需要提前几个月开始准备。
Then came an overextension: London. The capital proved inhospitable ground from the moment The Ice Co opened an office there in 2007: competition from Eskimo Ice ("king of the cube in London", The Ice Co begrudgingly admits) and a slew of other brands was robust. "It was very, very difficult to keep control of," Metcalfe said: "There was no loyalty." When The Ice Co entered London, ice was ￡7 per 12kg bag. Seven years later, it was ￡3.50. This price pressure, combined with the highly fragmented nature of the local market – dozens if not hundreds of individual businesses, as opposed to a handful of national retailers – proved too much of a challenge, and The Ice Co closed its London office in 2014.
之后出现了过度扩张：伦敦。自2007年The Ice Co公司在伦敦开设办事处以来，事实证明，伦敦不适合发展：来自爱斯基摩冰(“伦敦冰立方之王”，虽然Ice公司不想承认)和其他众多品牌的竞争十分激烈。“这是非常、非常难以控制的，”梅特卡夫说：“我们没有忠诚的消费者。”The Ice Co公司进入伦敦时其冰块是每袋12公斤，价格7英镑，7年后降到了3.5英镑。事实证明，价格压力加上当地市场的高度分散——与少数全国性零售商相比，就算没有数百个，也有几十个个体企业——是一个巨大的挑战，The Ice Co于2014年关闭了其伦敦办事处。
By this point, though, there were other, more promising signals that things had started to change. To call what happened in the years following 2007's Great Recession the "British Ice Boom" is only overselling it insomuch as our consumption of ice still lags way behind the US. But it would be entirely fair to say that, in the UK, ice was finally starting to get cool.
然而，在这一点上，出现了其他更有希望的信号，表明事情已经开始发生变化。把2007年经济大衰退后的几年发生的事情称为“英国冰块的繁荣”只是夸大其词，因为英国的冰块销量仍远远落后于美国。但可以这么说，在英国，冰终于“酷”起来了。
When the American author Matt Yglesias ignited a Twitter firestorm by referring to Europe as "a continent where they don't have ice cubes" in September this year, he was in fact far from the first American to note the dearth of ice in continental beverages. In Notes from a Big Country (published 1998), Bill Bryson wrote about the various culture shocks he experienced after returning to the US after decades spent in the UK, chief among them "the staunch conviction that ice is not a luxury item". And in his 2001 New Yorker profile of the ice magnate James Stuart, "The Emperor of Ice", Ian Parker would compare the US's voracious demand for ice to that of Europe, a region "stuck at an earlier stage of development", citing the British capital as ground zero of ice parsimoniousness ("Few things are more amusing to an American iceman than a gin-and-tonic in a London pub: the grudging tongs, the single cube").
今年9月，美国作家马特·伊格莱西亚斯称欧洲是“一个没有冰块的大陆”，在推特上引发了一场风暴。事实上，他远不是第一个注意到欧洲饮料缺乏冰块的美国人。在比尔·布莱森于1998年出版的《大国笔记》一书中，他描述了自己在英国生活数十年后回到美国后经历的各种文化冲击，其中最主要的一点就是“坚信冰不是奢侈品”。2001年，伊恩·帕克在《纽约客》上对冰业巨头詹姆斯·斯图尔特的简介《冰之王》中，将美国对冰的贪婪需求与“停留在较早发展阶段"的欧洲进行了比较，并将英国首都伦敦称为“冰块的洼地”。(“对一个美国冰人来说，没有什么比在伦敦酒吧里喝一杯杜松子酒和奎宁水更有趣的了：不情愿的钳子，一块冰”)。
