Purpled Oneshots

Dairy. Fucking. Queen.

D.Q. Corp., more commonly known as Dairy Queen and sometimes referred as D.Q., is an American chain of soft serve ice cream and fast-food restaurants owned by International Dairy Queen, Inc., a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway. International Dairy Queen, Inc., also owns Orange Julius, and formerly owned Karmelkorn[4] and Golden Skillet Fried Chicken.

The first DQ restaurant was located in Joliet, Illinois. It was operated by Sherb Noble and opened for business on June 22, 1940.[5] It served a variety of frozen products, such as soft serve ice cream.[6]

The company's corporate offices are located in the Minneapolis suburb of Edina, Minnesota.[7][8]

The soft-serve formula was first developed in 1938 by John Fremont "J.F." "Grandpa" McCullough and his son Alex. They convinced friend and loyal customer Sherb Noble to offer the product in his ice cream store in Kankakee, Illinois.[9] On the first day of sales, Noble dished out more than 1,600 servings of the new dessert within two hours.[10] Noble and the McCulloughs went on to open the first Dairy Queen store in 1940 in Joliet, Illinois. While this Dairy Queen has not been in operation since the 1950s, the building still stands at 501 N Chicago Street as a city-designated landmark.[11]

Since 1940, the chain has used a franchise system to expand its operations globally from ten stores in 1941 to one hundred by 1947, 1,446 in 1950, and 2,600 in 1955. The first store in Canada opened in Melville, Saskatchewan, Canada, 1953.[12] In the US, the state with the most Dairy Queen restaurants is Texas. Using the 2010 census, the state with the most Dairy Queen restaurants per person is Minnesota.[13][14]

In the nineties, investors bought Dairy Queen stores that were individually owned, intending to increase profitability through economies of scale. Vasari, LLC became the second-largest Dairy Queen operator in the country and operated 70 Dairy Queens across Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico. When stores were not profitable, these investment firms closed stores that did not meet their profitability goals. On October 30, 2017, the Vasari LLC filed for bankruptcy and announced it was closing 29 stores, including 10 in the Texas Panhandle.[15]

International Dairy Queen, Inc. (IDQ) is the parent company of Dairy Queen. In the United States, it operates under American Dairy Queen Corp.[16][17]

At the end of fiscal year 2014, Dairy Queen reported over 6,400 stores in more than 25 countries; about 4,500 of its stores (approximately 70%) were located in the United States.[16][17][18]

The red Dairy Queen symbol was introduced in 1958.[citation needed]

The company became International Dairy Queen, Inc. (IDQ) in 1962.

In 1987, IDQ bought the Orange Julius chain. IDQ was acquired by Berkshire Hathaway in 1998.[19]

Dairy Queens were a fixture of social life in small towns of the Midwestern and Southern United States during the 1950s and 1960s. In that role, they have often come to be referenced as a symbol of life in small-town America, as in Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections at Sixty and Beyond by Larry McMurtry, Dairy Queen Days by Robert Inman, and Chevrolet Summers, Dairy Queen Nights by Bob Greene.

From 1979 until 1981, the restaurant chain used the slogan "It's a real treat!". For many years, the franchise's slogan was "We treat you right". From the early-to-mid 1990s, the slogans "Hot Eats, Cool Treats" and "Think DQ" were used and preceded the aforementioned line in the Dairy Queen jingle. Later on, it was changed to "Meet Me at DQ" and "DQ: Something Different". Another slogan, introduced in early 2011, was "So Good It's RiDQulous",[39] with Dairy Queen's current logo infused in the word "ridiculous". In the mid-to-late 2010s, their slogan was "Fan Food, Not Fast Food".[40] As of 2019, DQ uses the slogan "Happy Tastes Good". The slogan This is Fan Food not Fast Food is still used on the cups, wrappers, and paper baskets.

In Texas, at the end of advertisements, there is frequently a Texas flag waving, and the new DQ logo and slogan below saying, "Eat Like A Texan". Previous slogans include "That's what I like about Texas", "For Hot Eats & Cool Treats, Think DQ", "Nobody beats DQ Treats & Eats", "DQ is Value Country", and "This is DQ Country". These advertisements featured Texas Country Reporter host Bob Phillips as a spokesperson since his program was mainly sponsored by Dairy Queen.

Dennis the Menace appeared in Dairy Queen marketing from 1971 until December 2002, when he was dropped because Dairy Queen felt children could no longer relate to him.[41][42] From 2006 to July 2011, the advertising focused on a large mouth with its tongue licking its large lips, which morphs into the Dairy Queen logo. The mouth was dropped in 2011 after Grey New York produced outlandish spots featuring a dapper man, played by John Behlmann, sporting a mustache, performing crazy feats for Dairy Queen replacing it. After announcing tasty menu offers, he would do something outrageous, like blow bubbles with kittens in them, water ski while boxing, or break a piñata, out of which tumbles Olympic gymnastics great Mary Lou Retton. Later, the same firm made additional commercials based around odd situation titles with the DQ logo placed somewhere in them, like "Gary DQlones Himself", "Now That's A Lunchtime DQuandary!", "After The DQonquest" and "Well, This Is A Bit DQrazy!". All were narrated by a man with an English accent.

In 2015, Dairy Queen and model railroad company of Milwaukee, Wm. K. Walthers came out with a Walthers Cornerstone HO 1:87 Scale models of a restaurant – one from the 1950s with the original logo and one from 2007–present with the current logo. The models are both officially licensed replicas.