Swampy's Florida

Everyone needs 3 pounds of ice cream that looks like a bunny!

This Baskin-Robbins Ice Cream Store was back when these shops were ice cream only shops. In the 1980s these were often found in malls and shopping strips. This one was in the Searstown Shopping Center in Ocala.

This was one of the many spots in Florida where Sears was already established in the Downtown area of the city. It was in the late ’60s that Sears decided to leave the Downtowns and building their own buildings miles away from their original location. Sears did this in Tampa, Orlando, Jacksonville, Miami, etc. That includes Ocala.

Searstown opened east of Ocala towards Silver Springs in the later ’60s. Sears did a bit more than other locations by adding further shopping to the Sears building. One of the shops was Baskin-Robbins, as shown above.

Sears stuck around until the early ’90s when the store left and went way west of Downtown Ocala to join the popular Paddock Mall. The former-Searstown shopping area was demolished and rebuilt for an Skaggs-Albertson grocery. Now there is a Big Lots there.

This advertisement appeared today, 1980, in the Ocala StarBanner​ .

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