drugstore cowboy

First use appears c. 1922 in the San Antonio Evening News. Sense 2 derives from soda fountains and ice cream counters as a once popular meeting spot in drugstores.

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drugstore cowboy (plural drugstore cowboys)

1. (dated) Someone who dresses and acts like a cowboy but has none of the skills.

   Synonym: dude

   • 1974, Film Heritage‎:

     When we first came to California and we started putting on Westerns, there were no riders in Hollywood; they were all drugstore cowboys.

   • [1989 May 29, “Who's a ‘Drugstore Cowboy’?”, in Newsweek, page 29:

     The Soviet Union, he [Marlin Fitzwater] insisted, was engaged “in a very strange pattern of public-relations gambits”; he compared Mikhail Gorbachev to a “drugstore cowboy,” an old-fashioned term for a pretentious impostor.]

   • 1990, Kenny Rogers, “Introduction”, in Cowboy Tales: Western Classics from American Masters‎, Viking Studio Books, →ISBN:

     I was raised on Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, and as a kid I dreamed of doing the things real cowboys do—not drugstore cowboys or rodeo cowboys, but the real sweat-and-dirt variety—like roping and riding, herding cattle, and breaking horses.

2. A young man who loafs around town, especially a lady's man who hangs out in public places in an attempt to pick up girls.
   • 1934, James T. Farrell, chapter 21, in The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan:

     When any of these jazz-age drugstore cowboys starts trying to fool around with his sister, he won't mince his words. He'll say, "See here, now, what do you mean, trying to ruin my sister?"

   • 1984, Carolyn Osborn, The Fields of Memory, Bryan, Texas: Shearer Publishing, →ISBN, page 14:

     I saw Duel in the Sun late one Friday afternoon, came out blinking at the drugstore cowboys standing in front of the fly-spattered windows of the cafe across the street […]

• plastic shaman
• milk-bar cowboy

• “drugstore cowboy”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.
• “drugstore cowboy”, in Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1996–present.