This feels very contrived; who organises a supermarket like that? "Where's the ice-cream?" "Which flavour? We keep them separately, to make an anecdote work."
(Like, the moral of the story still works, but the specifics feel very dubious...)
I could def. see Vanilla Ice Cream being in that container for a while for whatever reason.
Or it could be a small/local grocery store and the owner/manager really likes Vanilla, and did it for their own convenience.
Or I could imagine something like a Sonic drive-through, where you often pull up in to a slot and turn off your car, but only until your order gets brought to you by a bellhop:
- works when I order a burger (burger takes a few minutes to cook)
- doesn't work when I order a hot dog (those are hot and ready to go)
or something like, works when I order a chili dog (because they have to heat up the chili)
.... Wait, that's still a thing? Not American, and my visits there have only been to urban areas, but I had kind of assumed that this was something present in films from the 1960s, not, like, 2023.
At the very least, chocolate is neck and neck and on the only sales chart I could find (which I think was for the UK?) chocolate sold more than vanilla.