The National Home Show is on this week, providing homeowners with ideas on how to improve their humble abodes. Back in the early 1970s suggestions were offered on how to raise the money to afford new wood panelling and a basement mini-bar, such as buying your own convenience store franchise.

If interested, Mac's would set you up in an idyllic suburban setting straight out of a 1950s magazine ad. No overflowing garbage cans, no vehicles in the parking lot that should have been taken off the road 15 years earlier, no loitering juvenile delinquents or panhandlers, just happy, clean-cut families who treat a trip to your store with the same reverence as a church service.

Note that these parents appear to be taking their children into the store, thus showing more responsibility than the previous generation, who were prone to leaving their infants alone outside the store.

Mac's Milk opened its first store in 1962. Silverwood Dairies (later Silcorp) first invested in the company the following year, gaining full control shortly after today's ad appeared. Purchased by Quebec-based Alimentation Couche-Tard in 1999, Mac's tam-topped cat was soon sent to the old mascots home and replaced with a modified version of a night owl previously seen on Provi-Soir and Winks stores.

Source: Toronto Life, April 1971