An eight-year-old girl has become a TikTok sensation after brutally knocking over an ice cream van selling two £9 scoops.
Marnie, standing next to her identical twin sister Myla in Burnley, Lancashire, says the seller is “going nowhere” with such high prices.
The youngster tells his aunt Carice Lambert, who is filming: “So there’s an ice cream van over there selling two ice creams with two pieces of gum for a bloody nine quid.”
Shocked and with a thick Burnley accent, she says you can buy ice creams in her street for £1 or £2 each.
However, the cost is not the only thing that surprises Marnie.
She continues: “And he only makes a bloody card! Standing there with my cash – damn it.’
Karis replies, “That’s too bad, isn’t it?” Marnie agrees and adds loudly, “I bet he can hear me,” as she and her sister leave.
The video, filmed in Towne Park, has garnered 1.9 million views on TikTok and over 30,000 comments, mostly finding Marnie hilarious.
Several posters also agree that the ice cream in question is expensive.
One of them, Lily, wrote: “I support her on this and I wouldn’t put up with £9 either,” to which Karis, who posted the video, replied: “When it came to £9 on screen I told her : you really want it, she said not for that price, no, I’ll just get one out of the freezer when I get home,” followed by two crying and laughing emojis.
Many commented on how much they loved Marnie’s accent, while others said the girls looked like Harry Potter star Emma Watson.
Carys later told the Lancashire Post: “Marnie was really angry and wanted to express it on Tik Tok and now it’s gone viral.”
Speaking of the sisters, she said: “They’re a bit like Ant and Dec. Marnie speaks her mind, while Mila can be a bit quieter at times, but she always comes up with the best words.”
Although the video was posted as lighthearted fun, a number of ice cream vendors were left in despair at the dismantling, the Guardian reported.
One of them, John Taylor, whose C&M Ices van was named ‘2023 Mobile of the Year’, said the price hike had hit ice cream van owners hard, meaning they had no choice but to raise prices.
John told the paper: “It’s not just our industry. All industries are in the same boat. The problem is that everyone sees us as a cheap product.”
“Everyone seems to think that an ice cream should be 50p or £1” – prices he says were in the 1970s.
“They’ll happily pay four pounds for a warm Starbucks coffee, but they won’t pay a couple of pounds for a quality ice cream.”
He said several price hikes, including diesel, electricity, insurance, tolls and wages, had led to double-digit price increases for several years in a row.
John explained that ice cream van owners don’t have the power of a supermarket to buy, say, 1,000 pallets of Magnum at a lower price.
He added that the price of £4.50 for an ice cream scoop was the highest on the market but not “unreasonable”.
Last year we took a closer look at 99 Flake ice cream, which many believe isn’t called 99 because it once cost 99p
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