Arizona Iced Tea

The flavor of nostalgia

At an upscale grocery store, I recently bought an overpriced can of green tea flavored with ginseng and honey. I love all three of those ingredients separately, so this beverage sounded refreshing on a hot summer day. My first sip hurled me back through a nostalgia wormhole into the 1990s. This honey-ginseng-green tea flavor had apparently attached to all sorts of vivid memories and feelings from college. Not the quality stuff either, but mass-market crap. I had forgotten how often I used to drink huge glass bottles of Arizona brand iced tea in the ’90s.

Technically, it’s spelled AriZona, but it’s the labels more than the brand name that became iconic. 24-ounce bottles. Bright, bold labels. Some bottles whose glass was blue. It caught your attention. It was also cheap: 99 cents for 24 ounces. It sold like crazy.

They’ve managed to keep their tea that same price since 1992. How?