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When Pepsi Had a Navy
- duxup 7y agoInteresting story although: > Pepsi a fleet of 17 obsolete Soviet Navy diesel attack submarines along with a decommissioned cruiser, destroyer and frigate, as well as a number of new civilian oil tankers. At a stroke, PepsiCo had become the sixth most powerful navy in the world. Not sure a bunch of questionable quality / condition ships and some oil tankers would really be the "sixth most powerful."
- wil421 7y agoDid they change the quote? Largest makes much more sense. >making PepsiCo temporarily the sixth-largest Navy in the world.
- buzer 7y ago"powerful" is still part of the quote. It's from near the end of the text rather than from first paragraph.
- jandrese 7y agoWhat are the more powerful ones? US, UK, France, Korea?, who else? Japan's SDF was still pretty neutered at the time, China didn't have a navy to speak of, I'm not sure how many other countries would have beaten them at the time. Maybe Egypt?
- Conjoiner 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_Navy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_Navy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Navy#Equipment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Navy#Equipment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_Spanish_Navy_ships https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_Spanish_Navy_sh... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_Portuguese_Navy_ships https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_Portuguese_Navy...
- DocTomoe 7y ago"Were" implies "back then". Marine equipment 1989 was likely more plentiful, but less capable, to offset likely losses in the always-imminent WW3.
- icemelt8 7y agoPakistan Navy :)
- rangibaby 7y agoHere's what I got searching country names searching the pennant list from "Janes Fighting Ships 1988-89". It's limited to "major surface ships", and notably doesn't include the USSR due to their policy of regularly changing pennant numbers. I think it's OK for ballpark purposes. 1. USA 425 2. UK 95 3. Japan 81 4. France 65 5. Taiwan 60 6. China 52 7. Indonesia 36 8. India 35 9. Italy 34 10. Germany, Federal 30 https://www.dropbox.com/s/a74zpbb556lv4mn/ships.pdf?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/a74zpbb556lv4mn/ships.pdf?dl=0
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- jandrese 7y agoInteresting. I wonder what qualifies as a "major surface ship"? Presumably not 50 foot coast guard cutters?
- Iv 7y agoMy guess is that they only compare the fleets in number of attack submarines.
- thaumasiotes 7y agoI mean, that's what really counts in our hearts, right? :D
- Iv 7y agoThat's an imperfect metric, but at the time it was a good measure of the destruction potential you had against other navies. 17 attack submarines, even "obsolete" (which probably just means that the US navy and maybe one or two others could counter them) was an impressive force at the time.
- philwelch 7y agoThere aren’t that many powerful navies these days. It’s not like the age of dreadnoughts when countries like Japan and Argentina were getting into naval arms races.
- thaumasiotes 7y agoJapan is a strange example? They're a big island; you'd kind of expect them to focus on their navy. Much like England was a naval power and not a land power.
- credit_guy 7y agoJapan has a very decent Navy, including two aircraft carriers, Kaga and Izumo. [1]https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/japan-doesn’t-know-what-do-its-new-f-35-armed-aircraft-carriers-59397 https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/japan-doesn’t-know-wh...
- nashashmi 7y agoI dont get it. They traded Pepsi for scrap metal? Could not they have traded it for wood, or ore, or gold? Like raw materials?
- jandrese 7y agoPossibly, but the Soviets were looking to offload the old ships anyway and it might have been easier to requisition the mothballed military hardware instead of materials the population needs.
- bayareanative 7y agoAt the time, no. It depends on the lifecycles of the Soviets' assets because it was a bartering arrangement. Plus, gold could be stolen or skimmed, submarines were discrete units of barter that hopefully arrived in more or less one piece.
- pjc50 7y agoIt was a command economy, and the entire export surplus of those other items was probably committed to other trade purposes. We're used to total fungible value of everything, but in the Soviet Union bartering with what you had to hand was far more necessary.
- dillonmckay 7y agoWas blat the method of exchange?
- jhbadger 7y agoOne of the problems with a military-focused command economy like the Soviet Union's was that consumer goods were in short supply and often not that high quality even when available. But consumer goods are needed to keep people happy. How to get them? The USSR's ruble was worthless on the world market -- only by exchanging goods could they get them.
- ggerules 7y agoThis absolutely makes no sense.
- jimmaswell 7y agoHow?
- vmlinuz 7y agoAnd then, of course, there's the time when Pepsi almost had an air force, albeit briefly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_v._Pepsico,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_v._Pepsico,_Inc.
- daeken 7y agoI'm still bothered by this case. While I don't think that PepsiCo should've been forced to buy and then sell (for points) a Harrier jet, the fact that there were no consequences for the ad just kind of baffles me. If you look at any ad targeting youth markets from the time period, they had the same nonchalance; sure, they're not pitching a jet, but that just seems like a terrible argument.
- pjc50 7y agoI'm not sure what think is wrong with the ad besides making an offer they didn't want to make good on? The offer bit is a great opportunity to cite Carbolic Smoke Ball https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlill_v_Carbolic_Smoke_Ball_Co https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlill_v_Carbolic_Smoke_Bal...
- michaelt 7y agoI'm not sure about the Pepsi ad, but in basically every false advertising case the company accused goes for the "no reasonable person would believe that" defence. For example, Apple advertises an iPhone as "twice as fast for half the price"? They say no reasonable person would believe that [1] Or Vitaminwater says the drink "could promote healthy joints, support optimal immune function, and reduce the risk of eye disease"? They claim no reasonable person would believe vitaminwater was a healthy drink [2] I mean, this seems like a hole in the law that you can drive a truck through. [1] https://www.wired.com/2008/12/apple-says-cust/ https://www.wired.com/2008/12/apple-says-cust/ [2] https://www.businessinsider.com/coca-cola-glacau-vitaminwater-misleading-advertising-lawsuit-2014-10?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/coca-cola-glacau-vitaminwate...
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- pts_ 7y agoEast India Co
- omegaworks 7y ago>The Soviet ruble was still worthless on the international market Who controls the currency controls the country. A government forced to barter its warships so a multinational company would continue delivering its soft-drink to its citizens. I wonder if the deliberate sabotage of the Ruble helped usher in collapse.
- rmason 7y agoActually the Soviet Union was indirectly brought down by the humble FAX machine. The AFL-CIO from Detroit got friendly with the Polish Solidarity union. During protests the government would shut down communications. They told the AFL-CIO what they really could use were FAX machines. AFL people and priests smuggled in the FAX machines in their suitcases and with it an alternative communications network was established. During protests they could quickly send information country wide and they hoped the government wouldn't catch on and it worked. Without the absolute control over information one country after another fell. http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,159069,00.html http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,159069,...
- varjag 7y agoNot sure about communist Poland, but fax machine had little to do with fall of USSR.
- rmason 7y agoPoland was the domino and after it got its freedom one after another the rest of the countries in Eastern Europe gained their independence. This put immense pressure on the Soviet Union after people in some of its republics like Georgia and the Ukraine decided that they wanted their freedom too. The military panicked and staged a coup against Gorbachev. It then dawned on the Russians that they could have their freedom as well.
- rimliu 7y agoEhm. I think you should refresh your knowledge about the fall of the USSR. The Orange revolution in Ukraine and the Rose revolution in Georgia heppened years after USSR felt apart. In reality the Baltic states were the first to declare independance from the Soviet Union. And it had little to do with Poland. Source: citizen of Lithuania, the first one to break away.
- mirimir 7y agoAs I recall, during the 80s, Pepsi typically cost more than vodka.
- tedsuo 7y agoCan’t believe they didn’t mention the cherry (pepperoni?) on top: PepsiCo also got Gorbachev to huck some Pizza Hut for them: https://youtu.be/fgm14D1jHUw https://youtu.be/fgm14D1jHUw
- benj111 7y agoOlive surely?
- jedberg 7y agoI remember this! I was 12 when this happened, and I remember talking about it in history class, including all the stuff about Nixon and Krushchev.
- coleifer 7y agoSuper grimy site, picked up that I'm on at&t and redirected me to some scummy "take our survey and win some shit" site with a fake message dialog.
- creaghpatr 7y agoInteresting case there, but nowadays big conglomerates like Pepsi and Coke surely have thousands of security contractors on retainer? Then again, they can't exactly order an airstrike against Coke...
- deftnerd 7y agoThis is just a rewritten version of the AtlasObscura story from Jan 2018 https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/soviet-union-pepsi-ships https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/soviet-union-pepsi-shi... It's rewritten paragraph-by-paragraph, probably automatically using "rewriting tools" that blog spammers use to plagiarize articles. You can tell because the story follows the same threads from paragraph to paragraph.
- novaleaf 7y agogood catch, though probably not rewritten automatically. There's too much "context awareness" going on. If it was auto-written, it was then heavily edited by a native english speaker. also after skimming the atlas obscura article, I have to say I wish I read that instead. Better prose and a lot more images than the plagiarized version.