Loyalty rewards programs and free gifts are not really anything new when it comes to business.
You order nine burritos and the tenth is free, you open a bank account and you get a toaster.
It’s a way to coax a consumer into spending just a little more money with a company or
maybe pushing them into picking that one brand over the competitor.
They come in all types and sizes for all sorts of businesses, and as it turned out that included
a gas station chain in Florida in the 1950s that had their very own amusement park.
In the late 1930s, a man by the name of Stanley Hughey started a chain of independent gas
stations in the Tampa area called Super-Test.
Super-Test was cited as the first independent dealer in Tampa and it did pretty well for
itself.
By 1939 the chain had 10 locations across the area.
In the 1940s, Stanley’s son, Mike, got involved in the business and the two of them ran Super-Test
together.
Now as World War II came to an end and the 1940s became the 1950s, automobiles exploded
in popularity.
Car ownership in the US doubled over the decade after the war.
More Americans than ever before were hitting the road, and that meant needing to fuel up
before they did.
I mean, it was also the 1940s.
Cars were getting like 15 miles to a gallon.
So quickly gas stations found themselves fighting over the American motorist’s dollar, and
that meant turning to a trick that proved useful just a decade or so earlier.
During the great depression, glass manufacturers found themselves in a tough spot.
They were used to handcrafting and selling expensive glass dinner sets for people.
But with the depression on, folks weren’t really in the market for expensive glassware.
They were more in the market for dinner, or a job, or hopefully both.
So the manufacturers pivoted from custom hand-made sets to cheaper mass-produced sets, and here’s
where they got clever: Rather than selling the dinnerware directly to consumers, they
sold them wholesale to other businesses.
Those businesses, in turn, gave away the cheap glassware as promotional incentives to lure
consumers in.
At a time where money was extremely tight, the allure of something free was powerful.
These glass dinner sets would come to be known as depression glass or sometimes depression-ware.
So back to the 1940s.
Gas stations found themselves looking for ways to win over customers, and so they turned
to that same depression ware concept.
The service stations gave away car accessories, plants, glasses, stamps, and even toys just
for buying gasoline.
Well, in 1951, the father and son team behind Super-Test had another idea and with that,
The Super-Test Amusement Park was born.
The first Super-Test Amusement Park opened on August 13th, 1951 in Tampa Florida right
on 13th Street, and in its original form, it was kind of a stretch to call it an amusement park.
The park opened with three attractions, a 64-horse Philadelphia Toboggan Merry-Go-Round,
and a small boat and airplane ride for children.
The park was open to guests Monday through Saturday from 4pm to 10pm.
Unfortunately, since it was the 1950s and it was Florida, the park was also segregated,
and Thursdays were the only day that African American guests could visit.
Motorists would get one free ticket for a ride by purchasing either five gallons of
gas, five gallons of kerosene, or one quart of oil from any Super-Test location.
The idea was to buy your gas over and over again from Super-Test, stockpile these tickets,
and then take your family to the amusement park for free.
Sure, it only had three rides, but it’s not like it cost you anything extra… except
it kind of did.
What’s clever is that the park also offered some food, drinks, and snacks, and those weren’t free.
So on top of the return business from people looking for tickets, they could count on concession
income.
The park did so well in its first year that by the summer of 1952 they began to run ads
in local papers looking for larger plots of land for an expanded Super-Test Amusement Park.
On February 7th, 1953 the original park closed its doors, and just two months later it reopened
at its new home on Columbus Drive and Dale Mabry Highway.
The new park offered more rides on top of the original three and would, over the years,
come to offer a Ferris Wheel, a whip ride, a caterpillar ride, a miniature train ride
set along a half-mile-long track, and a small autopia-like ride for kids.
In addition to the attractions, the park also featured a 24/7 diner, and what was touted
as the largest gas station in Tampa at the time.
It also had a zoo that, well, looked exactly like what you’d expect a zoo owned by a
gas station in Florida in the 1950s to look like.
It housed monkeys, a bear, and a peacock.
It wasn’t just the park that expanded during the 1950s, however.
The program for tickets eventually grew as well.
They partnered with the food brand Stokely-Van Camp, and anyone who purchased the company’s
food products could bring the labels into their nearest Super-Test station for a free
ticket.
Super-Test even doubled up on trying to win people over with freebies.
One holiday season they advertised that they’d be giving away a free bike to one random guest
every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, further incentivizing people to visit.
After its grand re-opening, the park would continue to operate for 11 more years with
more or less nothing notable happening.
Oh, well, there was this one time in 1960 when an eight-year-old boy got too close to
the cages at the “zoo” and had his finger bitten off by a monkey.
I’d imagine that was pretty notable for the boy and the monkey.
Other than that, it was just an average run-of-the-mill amusement park that just happened to be owned
and operated by and attached to a gas station.
The other thing that made it unique was that it was Tampa’s first amusement park.
Busch Gardens would eventually open while Super-Test was still around, but at that point,
it was essentially just a brewery and some animal exhibits.
And this was years before Tampa residents could just drive to Orlando for Universal or Disney World.
The Florida State Fair was, and still is, held in Tampa, but that only lasts a week
or two out of the year.
So for most Tampa residents at the time, the Super-Test Park was the best way to get that
amusement park experience.
Then in May of 1964, without much fanfare, Super-Test took out an ad in the paper announcing
that the park would be closing on June 13th until further notice, with no announced plans
to reopen or explanation as to why they were closing.
By that December the park would be replaced with a shoe store called the “Self Service
Shoe Store”, which is possibly the laziest name for the laziest shoe store ever.
There was no mention of financial troubles or any other notable incident that would have
caused the closure.
It’s likely that the park just wasn’t financially beneficial enough for them when
it came to driving gasoline sales and was far outside the scope of their main business.
The end of the Super-Test Amusement Park wasn’t the end of Super-Test, nor was it the end
of their incentives for customers.
In 1970 they created the Super-Test Travel Club.
According to a newspaper article about the arms race of gas station perks, the Super-Test
Travel Club offered a four-day-three-night vacation for two at a number of locations,
including Miami Beach, Vegas, and New Orleans, with the purchase of ten gallons or more of
gas.
It didn’t cover meals or transportation.
This one article was actually the only mention I could find of the program.
My guess is that they partnered with a handful of motels in these various cities and just
counted on people to not take them up on the offer.
In any case, it doesn’t look like the program lasted long.
As for freebies in general, they evolved over the years and today we still have loyalty
reward programs all over the place.
Somewhere along the line businesses realized that they had better luck by giving away a
bit of whatever it was they were selling to begin with though.
That free lunch after ten lunches, or a free coffee at the coffee place.
Stamps for buying gas?
Not so much.
And as far as I can tell from my searching around, the Super-Test Park is the only example
of a gas station using their own actual amusement park as a freebie.
The closest example after that is maybe the discounted Six-Flags tickets that you could
get with cans of Coke.
Not quite the same though.
It makes the Super-Test Amusement Park pretty unique; a standout in not only gas station
and amusement park history, but Tampa and Florida’s history as well.