Everyone's a winner baybaby, that's the truth! It is indeed the extinct but still-beloved sign for Perrette's's convenience store, home of the never-imitiated, never-duplicated Sip-Sac, as featured in this Gazette ad below from 1972 generously sent by reader Daren. To those who answered correctly- go out and treat yourself to something and cool in a plastic bag that you have to stab with a sharp plastic straw.
The great Perrette chain! As for the item, I'd say their juice bags that no one could open without making a mess. And there might not be pictures, but there was a nice reconstruction of the experience in the movie 1981.
ReplyDeletePerrettes but I have no idea about any unique item
ReplyDeleteWell lets see: The glass milk jugs with the cardboard cap,The sip sacs, the 4 liter bag of juices(3 bags like milk), I remember buying their loaves of bread for $0.25 EACH, Not $3.00 like today, The Popsicles,I even remember the matches as being a kid, we liked fires and I used them to light bulrushes on fire dipped in gas. I was a west island boy playing in the woods and fields of Dorval north. Eventually all the Pierrette's were taken over by Asians and then disappeared all together around 1990-91
DeleteThe Pierrette I frequented eventually burned down in a strip mall and was rebuilt but with a run of the mill depanneur that changed names every year for a while. Also my favorite five & dime/pharmacy (named Ethics) where we spent every dime we had on candy and jokes went with it.Even the restaurant named Ramsay's we bought fries and gravy and listened to 3 songs for $.25 Or the laundromat we played in all the time.
Perrette Depanneur, they sold Sippy Sacks
ReplyDeletePerrette's
ReplyDeleteWell, Perrette is the store. That's unmistakable. What they sold...hmm, sip sacs?
ReplyDeleteI know this is Pierrette's. I know that they sold milk but I suspect that isn't really the answer you're looking for.
ReplyDeletePerrette's was the the first corporate dep-chain, where the clerk told us that he smokes dope in the beer cooler-room because peoples smell sense shuts down in the sudden drop of temperature.
ReplyDeleteThat is the logo for the much-missed Perrete's chain. The only 2 products I recall from my childhood (circa mid 70s) are the Zig-zags and their milk cartons with the lady carrying gallons of milk on her head.
ReplyDeleteThe lady was known as "Perrette" herself. I think there was the same parable on every milk carton..."Perrette and the Milk Jug" ...something akin to not carrying all one's eggs in one basket. Alls I knows is that they'd sell you a 26'er of St. Antoine Abbe cider without carding you. Their slogans were "Watch it, the man behind the ocunter is going to smile at you." and "Quebec's I-forgot-it store" (back around the time, when, ironically, the license-plate tagline switched from La Belle Province to Je me souviens.
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I saw this and was so excited! I'll finally get one right. Little did I know that everyone else had already answered it. So yeah, just for the record...it's Perrett's and the object in question is definitely the sippy sac thingy...I remember when the price went up 100% from 5¢ to 10¢! I'm proud to say that 7 out of 10 times I could open it without spilling. When done, we'd blow those suckers up and pop 'em scaring the heck out of everyone buying their milk & cigarettes. Also, I'd like to point out the apostrophe which was not quite yet illegal. :D
ReplyDeleteMake that "counter." Peabody regrets the error.
ReplyDeletePeabody
Perrette's and of course the sip sacks, which were basically colored water and suger. Weird but delicious. I was there in the late 80s or early 90s when one of the last Perrette's burned down - the one in Westmount. I was going in to buy a pack of du Maurier and I noticed that the roof was smoking. I asked the clerk, "Do you know your roof is on fire?" "No I didn't. What should I do?" "Umm, call 9-1-1." 2 hours later the building was completely gone. The whole neighborhood came out to watch and the guy from Copoli across the street brought us all coffee.
ReplyDeleteAnd it was yet another chain that failed to Couche-Tard. At one point in Pincourt, there were three Couche-Tards one next to the other: a former Provi-Soir, a former Perrette, and a former La Maisonnée. The La Maisonnée is now a Subway, but the other two are still Couche-Tard.
ReplyDeleteI remember the poem, because the English version told the story about the milk cans falling down and then something along the lines of "What will poor Perrette do now/ If he beat her as was fitting" (the husband having been mentioned a few lines before), which wasn't in the French version and wouldn't pass the censor now, for sure.
ReplyDeletePerrette was a woman gathering full milk canisters, she got from milking the cows. As she walked along she started dreaming of creating a big business. She ended up falling, and lost all the milk and her dreams.
DeleteI was just thinking about this two days ago. As a kid I would read the story as I ate breakfast, before going to school.
Perrette's corporate offices were at 999 boul. St-Martin O., in Laval...they had a management training office on Ste-Catherine W. in Westmount opposite Alexis-Nihon.
ReplyDeleteThere is a depanneur at St-Jacques and Elmhurst that still uses the Perrette's frame of the sign to enclose its current logo...there was a Perrette's in Beaconsfield on Beaconsfield Blvd. where there is now a pet food and dog groomer, then Perrette's moved across to the NE corner of Beaconsfield and St-Louis, had a pretty suspicious fire, then re-built before becoming the current location of HUB Hardware (Couche-Tard ensconced itself down the street on Petro-Canada land dating back to the days of a Petrofina station that, also, went up in smoke under suspicious circumstances...)
I didn't know the dep at the corner of St-Jacques and Elmhurst used to be a Perrette! I'll always known that place as an indie dep.
ReplyDeleteAside from the Perrette I mentioned in Pincourt, there also was the one in Ile Perrot, at the corner of Don-Quichotte and Grand Boul., in diagonal across from what was a Provi-Soir. Just as in Pincourt, they're both Couche-Tard now (same structure: the former Provi-Soir is the main one, being open 24 hours, and the former Perrette is the less popular one that actually closes at night).
I find it much easier to spot the former La Maisonnée deps (like on Parc near Prince-Arthur and on Sherbrooke St. W. in NDG -- is that one still called La Monnaie?).
I remember that Elmhurst/St. James Perrette's very well. I scored a copy of Sam Cooke's Greatest Hits (vinyl) for 99 cents. (TeeVee Records, I think.)
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The Very Best of Roy Orbison too. Again, 9 cents.
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99 cents
ReplyDeleteThe dépanneur at Bloomfield/Van-Horne also was a “Perrette“, and the sign still has the old Perrette’s shape:
ReplyDeletehttp://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=45.522616,-73.613044&spn=0,0.011941&z=17&layer=c&cbll=45.522729,-73.612932&panoid=ill_KCNURGHy4pKKQeBPyA&cbp=12,190.23,,0,-1.15
* * *
“Perrette et le pot au lait” has to be the most known La Fontaine* fable because it was printed on all those milk cartons… I must have read it 10,000 times when I was eating my cereal in the morning… (But I never noticed that there was an english version on the other side).
* He basically repackaged old Æsop’s fables in order to criticize his contemporary society, and to avoid censorship, he most often used animals.
I googled. The depanneur used an existing translation:
ReplyDeletePerrette skipped for joy as she dreamt of what she'd bought.
The crock crashed. Farewell cow, calf, fat pig, eggs not hatched out.
The mistress of wealth grieved to forfeit forever
The profits that were mounting.
How ask her husband to forgive her
Lest he beat her as was fitting?
And thus ended the farce we have watched:
Don't count your chickens before they are hatched.
The original version just says she's "En grand danger d'être battue."
I sent in the Perrette's sign and Sip Sack idea because I just saw the movie 1981, which Lady Jaye also mentioned. They also show the plastic, white Col. Sanders bank, which I have. Perrette's also had weird-flavoured chips, like pizza and hot dog.
ReplyDeleteI used to get my 10 cent bag of sugar-water at the Perrette's in Westmount. We called them 'Mini-Sips' just like the ad states. The cool thing to do was to blow up the bag via the straw and then stomp down on it and see who could make the loudest pop.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad I'm not the only one who remembered the reference to poor Perrette getting whooped for spilling the milk...
I remember a later promo at Perrette where you could get Smurfs drinking glasses when you bought gas. That was in the late 80s.
ReplyDeleteI know the Grand/Don-Quichotte location...next door to a former massage parlour in whose parking lot my buddy once locked himself out of his car and went to console himself with a Popsicle at that very Perrette's while he waited for a secondary key from home...
ReplyDeleteLa Maisonnee in NDG, NW corner of Westhill and Sherbrooke, is now an Amir Restaurant. That lot was empty for years and years, overgrown, with billboards facing Sherbrooke, until La Maisonee was erected in the 70s...next door to what was then the West End Variety with its "indoor garden court" (plastic chairs surrounded by plastic flowers) where one could get a greasy burger or grilled cheese. Charlie Good, the Hydro manager who schooled Rene Levesque on the energy portfolio, used to hang there after he retired after 45 years starting with the old Montreal Light Heat & Power. There was a "gentleman's relaxation clinic" above the West End Variety...
Speaking of the Perette's at Elmhurst and Saint-Jacques...
ReplyDeleteDoes anyone here remember Ye Olde Pub? My friends and I used to get pretty shit-faced in there on 25 cent drafts after the priests were done ass-raping us at Loyola. Metaphorically speaking.
Or the old Coke bottling plant up by the train tracks? Hop the fence, grab a couple of crates of empties, haul 'em over to the dep and you'd be in smokes for days. Any leftover change we'd blow on the freshest ice cream in town at the Sealtest diary.
Good times. Sort of.
grew up on the hampton and sherbrooke (NDG!!!) perrettes supplies.I remember my dad gave me a buck and I would get 2quarts of milk and 2 loaves of bread!!!In the late 70s' the band black flag had a huge(punk...) hit SIX PACK.. BUT FOR US INSTEAD OF 35 DOLLARS WE SANG 35 CENTS AND A SIP SAC TO MY NAME ....SIP SAC SPENT THE REST ON BEER SO WHOSE TO BLAME???? SIP SAC!!! i MISS NDG AND HOT MTL NIGHTS SHITTY VANCOUVER RAINS TWICE A WEEK THE first time for 4 days the second time for 3 days!!!
ReplyDeletePerrete, you bet, where the milk is so good, it goes moo!!
ReplyDeletePerrette - they also sold a line of juices in cartons with animal characters - a wolf, a lion. a bear (I think) in different flavours - so redolent of my childhood - thanks for posting that!!!
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ReplyDeleteFondly remember the Perrette in Chateauguay. Love their sip sacks... never used the straw, ripped a hole in the corner of the plastic bag! Brings back memories of when I was really young and playing t-ball and the first couple of years of softball... each game one of the kid would bring a bag full of sip sacks for the whole team to drink after the game. Oh fun times! :)
ReplyDeleteCan you remember the animals on each sip sac associated to each flavour?
ReplyDeleteRed fruit punch = a boxing Kangaroo.
Orange = ferocious lion
Lemonade = sour faced bear
Grape = snarly wolf
Can anyone confirm this?
Ro