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Pepsi’s $32B Typo Caused Deadly Riots
- dr_dshiv 6y agoThis is an incredible story. 349! Everybody wins!
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 6y agoFor everybody who was saying "Wikipedia is complete, there's nothing left to write about" yesterday, as far as I can there is not a word about this on the whole site, certainly not on the Pepsi page. Time to get to work! https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=Pepsi+349&ns0=1&ns9=1&ns11=1&ns12=1 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=Pepsi+349&ns0=1&... Edit: I stand corrected, there is a single paragraph in here. Nothing standalone/linkable though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_in_the_Philippines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_in_the_Philippines
- duxup 6y agoIs this something that should be on the Wikipedia Pepsi page? While it is an interesting story I don't really think it is the kind of thing I'd be looking for.
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 6y agoThere's acres on eg. Crystal Pepsi and New Coke, neither of which (AFAIK) caused any people to die.
- Zenbit_UX 6y agoReally? You don't think a corporations blunder that took lives and led to riots is deserving of inclusion? I can say Pepsi certainly doesn't want it there, your motivations are interely baffling though.
- duxup 6y agoI think it was a technical blunder and I don't buy into the idea that they're responsible for the actions of individuals in a riot. If someone upset that they (or more likely someone else) should have won a prize takes actions that lead to the death of another ... I don't believe Pepsi is responsible for that.
- 14 6y agoIt still seems like a very interesting part of history whether they were at fault or not. They have made dumb mistakes on multiple occasions if you remember the Harrier Jet give away they blundered and someone came up with the points. So I believe this is worthy of mention on the Pepsi Wikipedia page it’s part of the business success and hardships. Maybe there will be more. Maybe not.
- sllabres 6y agoYes another 'glitch' and even funnier, because no one was harmed... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_v._Pepsico,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_v._Pepsico,_Inc.
- gmanley 6y agoSo then let people come to that conclusion on their own after they've read the facts. The Wikipedia content shouldn't imply fault. It just needs to document what actually happened.
- hundchenkatze 6y agoInteresting, a company's history is about the only reason I'd visit their Wikipedia page.
- pixelbath 6y agoThere are many times I'm glad that individual people don't decide the guidelines for inclusion on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(events)#Inclusion_criteria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(events)#...
- vortico 6y agoWhat about on the Filipino Wikipedia? It's better to translate rather than start from scratch. I think it would be an excellent new English article with a mention on the Pepsi article, if there are enough sources to claim that it's significant enough.
- throwaway2048 6y agoControversial stuff, even well documented controversial stuff, gets scrubbed from Wikipedia all the time. Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAND_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAND_Corporation You would suppose a think tank directly responsible for such policy gems as : • Mutually assured destruction • The Missile Gap • Planned Shrinkage • tax cuts for the rich and service cuts for the poor • Systematic Torture of enemy soldiers in the Vietnam war • Deployment of Agent Orange • Planned military coups of a number of third world nations • Their employee (Daniel Ellsburg) leaked the pentagon papers And all manner more of cold war controversies and excesses would be better covered, but any attempt to introduce them to the article are almost immediately cleaned from that page (check the edit history). The history of the RAND corporation is documented, but you aren't going to find that information on Wikipedia. There is very clearly a PR organization sitting on top of that article scrubbing and sterilizing all the dirty stuff RAND has been involved in.
- andrewflnr 6y agoYou can link to edits. Why don't you show us some of the ones you're talking about?
- gerdesj 6y agoI started hunting through the edit history which is pretty involved to see if I could find some examples. I notice that MAD is mentioned in the section "RAND Corp". I gave up then!
- why_only_15 6y agoI looked at the edit history and couldn't find such edits in the last three or so years. Do you have any particular edits you're thinking of?
- lostgame 6y ago>> For everybody who was saying "Wikipedia is complete, there's nothing left to write about" What?!? This is one of the stupider things I’ve heard from this community. Not only do I find it very suspect that ‘everything has an article’, but these people are aware of new things being discovered and invented, no?
- arkades 6y agoPeople think Wikipedia is complete??? I could add stuff in my field of specialty constantly. I just don't want to jump through all the hoops that come with being a wikipedia contributor, so I keep all my notes on a private wiki.
- baby 6y agoThis selfish
- rjbwork 6y agoPerhaps it is the wikipedia administration, moderation, and editing team that have put up such barriers who are selfish. It is selfish to expect others to jump through your hoops to contribute advanced technical knowledge out of the kindness of their hearts.
- john-radio 6y agoJust a reminder that you're only assuming that the information that arkades would like to add is even accurate. (No offense to them, I'm sure it is, just pointing out that the process of editing that encyclopedia is burdensome for a reason).
- arkades 6y agoNo offense taken. Weeding out for accuracy is a fair and important concern, and there's no reason to assume a random person on the internet is the expert they believe themselves to be. Though I'd point out that unless wikipedia has a team of people whose expertise equals or at least vaguely approximates my own (or that of any expert that might contribute), I have to raise the question of whether that's really what they're filtering, or simply something that superficially looks like accuracy to someone unfamiliar with the material. It also assumes that the inaccuracy of the current articles is less than the inaccuracy of articles under a hypothetical alternative moderation policy. That might be true, or it might not - chase away enough contributors and you're left with one-sided, stale information. I imagine that's fine for an article on the simpsons, but maybe not great if you're looking up leukemias.
- catalogia 6y agoI've noticed that corporate history tends to be a blind spot for Wikipedia. I suspect part of the reason for this is corporate PR departments have more resources than volunteer encyclopedians.
- capableweb 6y agoInteresting story, but the clickbait headline is not needed here. Story ends with: > At the end of everything, Pepsi’s total combined losses, between physical, legal, and brand equity costs, would top $20M. Their market share would plummet and take years to rebound. The "$32 billion" seems to come from the amount of bottles who would win the prize, but Pepsi didn't actually pay out the promised amount, so it didn't cost them $32 billion in the end.
- cat199 6y agoDon't think this is really that clickbaity - the typo amount accounted to 32B, and the outrage caused by that non-existent 32B lead to riots in which people died, in other words, deadly riots. sometimes things are legitimately outrageous and worthy of an emotionally charged headline.
- capableweb 6y agoIt is clickbaity. There was no "typo" (Pepsi said it was a "system error") and there was nothing that cost them $32B. The only true parts of the headline is "Pepsi" and "caused deadly riots", which I agree with you, is outrageous and should never have happened. But we don't have to lie about the content of a story in order to make this outrageous, it's already outrageous enough with the facts.
- abofh 6y agoPepsi's typo didn't cause 32B of loss to them, but by some measure, there was a tiny, brief window where the country thought it was 32B richer. And this was before the extensive use of the internet, so it probably took weeks for people to discover that they shouldn't have bought that car/house/whatever. So yes, Pepsi's typo didn't cost them 32B, but 32B of economic value was instantaneously created, and then, after some time, destroyed. Was its total economic cost 32B? No, but was 32B a reasonable number to state? Sure. Pepsi's 20MM mistake over 32B caused riots seems a lot more wordy, no?
- jrochkind1 6y ago
- duxup 6y agoYou'd think maybe as they were being printed you'd record the actual number being printed on the side somewhere and audit that every once in a while...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ttterrific 6y agoGreat piece but click bait title and featured image is Hong Kong democracy protests...?
- efreak 6y agoClickbait, yes. To be fair, though, the top image is frequently stock photos, and they probably just did a search for riot or something and picked the first result.
- fredley 6y agoI would love to know what the bug was, sadly we'll probably never know. I imagine the engineer responsible for `NEVER 349` made a mistake that ended up flipping a single bit, to the `ALWAYS 349` position...
- IceWreck 6y ago800,000 bottles ? This mightve been intentional
- ddalex 6y agoa Coca-Cola operative infiltrated in the factory took care of it
- slim 6y agomy guess : they setup a machine that prints the successive numbers inside the bottle caps and there is no way to skip a number, they had to remove them afterwards.. someone simply forgot to do that.
- mkl 6y agoMaking 800,000 extra bottle caps and removing them later seems like a plan that wouldn't have left the drawing board. Especially with the risk of fraud from these particular caps.
- jjk166 6y agoWouldn't surprise me if they had a little piston or something to push off every Xth bottle but there was an off-by-one error so they wound up pushing off every bottle with 348 printed instead, or perhaps they had to restart the line once and no one told the engineer to adjust for it so the place was off after that.
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 6y agoIt sounds like the bottling factory printing all the other numbers simply missed the memo on not printing 349.
- klyrs 6y agoReally puts their "live for now" ad into perspective... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_for_Now_(Pepsi) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_for_Now_(Pepsi)
- ouid 6y agoThat wasn't a computer error.
- Xenoamorphous 6y agoIt sucks for whoever got the “real” 349 bottles.
- sergiotapia 6y agoI wonder if this is a third-world thing, soda contests for cash. I remember when I was 12 in Bolivia, we had literal Coca Cola scratch off cards and had to collect bottle caps with the numbers to make a lot of cash. Kids would trade bottle caps, rumors floated about fulanito having the rare cap and he would sell it for the right amount, etc. Been in the states for a few years now and never heard of something like that here. Then again I haven't had soda in the same amount of time.
- kube-system 6y agoWe used to have those kinds of bottle cap for cash contests in the US, I think it was most common in the late 90s and early 00s.
- projektfu 6y agoWhen it debuted, McDonald's "Monopoly" game was a huge deal and people would eagerly open their tickets to see if they won a big prize. If they won it was usually a small fries or another ticket, but sometimes it was some money and one person won $1M. After a while the luster wore off and it faded into the background. I'm sure it boosted sales in its first few years quite a bit but now you hardly hear about it. I'm actually surprised it still happens.
- nrmitchi 6y agoI mean, it was also kind of a giant fraud (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonald%27s_Monopoly#Fraud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonald%27s_Monopoly#Fraud), which may have contributed to it being less of a big thing these days.
- sidewndr46 6y agoI don't think it "wore off" or "faded into the background". The operation was fraud, at least in the US & Canada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonald%27s_Monopoly#Fraud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonald%27s_Monopoly#Fraud
- 6y ago
- xchaotic 6y agoMoral of the story - if you are a big multinational company you can literally get away with murder and even increase market even with the most botched marketing campaign selling sugar water
- fredley 6y agoHey, cut them some slack, at least they weren't trying to destabilise the country. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company#The_United_Fruit_Company_in_Honduras https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company#The_Unite...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ekianjo 6y ago> you can literally get away with murder Pepsi killed anyone? That's not what the story says at all. Accidental death is not the same as murder.
- afandian 6y agoWrong sugar-water vendor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinaltrainal_v._Coca-Cola_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinaltrainal_v._Coca-Cola_Co. (edit HN is botching the URL. There's a '.' character on the end)
- frosted-flakes 6y agoA trailing period in URLs in written prose is always ambiguous. Is it the end of the sentence, or part of the URL? If a trailing period is legal, what do you do if a URL is at the end of the sentence? Leave a space between them? It's fine for HTML because you control where the a tag goes, but auto-linking like HN does can't distinguish between the two cases.
- afandian 6y agoHTTP and e.g. markdown has solved this with angle brackets. I tried that (didn't work), and putting a question mark at the end (also didn't work). What did work was putting two full-stops, but that was so ambiguous that I left it as-was. Wikipedia has a redirect in place so obviously HN isn't the only one with problems.
- rootsudo 6y agoNever knew! Nowadays in the Philippines, Pepsi is the dominant brand, Mountain Dew is the #1 beverage in the Country and FEMSA, the bottler for Coke, which is the same as it's Mexican and South American bottler had to divest and sell it's assets back to Coke USA because it was so unprofitable because it didn't properly plan for Sugar futures. So, Coke is #2 in the country and there was a while where it was unavailable in Metro Manila, even in BGC/Taguig..where it's corporate head quarters are.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- BaitBlock 6y agohttps://baitblock.app/read/medium.com/better-marketing/pepsis-40-billion-typo-caused-deadly-riots-3d671295d1bd https://baitblock.app/read/medium.com/better-marketing/pepsi... Reader mode in case you don't prefer Medium
- sradman 6y agoTLDR; via Wikipedia [1] > [May 25, 1992] As part of PepsiCo's local promotion titled Number Fever, it was announced that the person who possessed the Pepsi bottle cap with the Number 349 is eligible to claim the 1 million peso prize. About 800,000 were eligible for the prize instead of an intended single winner. Several protests and bombings followed after Pepsi refused to award the 1 million prize to thousands of bottle cap holders and said that a computer glitch caused the incident. [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_in_the_Philippines#Events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_in_the_Philippines#Events [2] https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19930726&slug=1712840 https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19930726&slug...
- zerop 6y agoIs it just me or others also think that medium has really spoilt our reading experience on the web... they are putting anything behind paywall, without author's consent... This is not what we wanted Medium to become.... Please stop publishing to Medium.
- mark-r 6y agoNot the only time they made a mistake in a promotion, this one was in the U.S.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_v._Pepsico,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_v._Pepsico,_Inc.
- frogpelt 6y agoRelevant news story: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/1996-man-sues-pepsi-for-not-giving-him-a-harrier-jet/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/1996-man-sues-pepsi-for-not-giv...
- joezydeco 6y agoThere was a similar glitch in a contest Kraft held back in the late 1980s. https://apnews.com/aa740ca43955c874dadb0394afc22940 https://apnews.com/aa740ca43955c874dadb0394afc22940 TLDR almost every piece was a winner instead of just a few rare ones. I managed to mail in a few pieces before the packages got recalled, I remember being in multiple class action suits and getting multiple waves of settlement checks and coupons for free food over the next few years. Obviously I was not going to get 4 vans, 12 bicycles, and 10 skateboards. Contests now regularly use the "Kraft Clause" to avoid this problem. https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=c742f572-f3e2-43cd-aa64-de47fbe1a926 https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=c742f572-f3e2... "“If due to a printing, production or other error, more prizes are claimed than are intended to be awarded for any prize level, the intended prizes will be awarded in a random drawing from among all verified and validated prize claims received for that prize level. In no event will more than the stated number of prizes be awarded.”
- ponker 6y agoIt’s great to be powerful, you can completely fuck some shit up and walk away with a shrug. Pepsi should have been held to pay the $32 billion and if they didn’t have it, go bankrupt and become the property of the creditors.
- netsharc 6y agoReading the judges' conclusions I have to wonder if Pepsi bribed some people to get away with the not guilty verdict...
- Udik 6y agoWhat strikes me as food for thought is the stupidity and wickedness of the riots. I understand the rage if you own one of the few winning tickets of a lottery and the organization doesn't want to pay out. But in this case they knew that it had to be a mistake, as they all had the winning ticket. Were they really thinking that Pepsi should pay $40k to each and all of them because they all possessed the same identical plastic cap? Would they not realize that receiving all almost $20 was a larger collective gain? And more in general, how do you govern a country where the population exhibits this kind of inability to see the larger picture and the point of view of the opponents in a dispute?
- klyrs 6y agoAsk that about Canadians, who trashed Vancouver when the Canucks lost a damned hockey game.
- netsharc 6y agoYou have to imagine people in poverty and a sum that is not only poverty-ending, but probably allowing you to live in relative luxury, probably allowing you to start a business to have a better source of income. Assuming you're an American not living in a leaky tin-roofed cardboard box in 2020, sure, for you $40,000 is not that sum of money, but in early 1990's Philipphines it probably was...
- Udik 6y agoYou can simply multiply that sum by 100 or 1000 and ask yourself how would you react if the same happened to you. In this order: 1) you buy several Pepsi 2) you discover you won 40 million 3) you discover everyone else won 40 million 4) it is explained to you that there was a mistake and you can get 100 dollars as a refund. 5) you start burning cars and throwing bombs together with all the others because each really really wants his 40 million. Do you think you would go from 4 to 5? Do you think your society would work if it contained a large percentage of people who would go from 4 to 5? That's what I was trying to point out.
- 6y ago
- emi420 6y ago1996 in Argentina, Coke did a promotion where promised "two caps for a Ramones concert ticket" (we are huge fans here). Of course they didn't can keep with this promise and disturbs occurred: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciq9ONHj4bc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciq9ONHj4bc (spanish)
- brokenmachine 6y ago"disturbs occurred"! I love that expression!
- js2 6y agoContemporaneous reporting: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1993/07/29/a-pepsi-giveaway-gone-wrong/1a6af4b1-2b6f-4e5a-9b1d-5dc6799ac2af/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1993/07/29/a... The article refers to a similar incident in Chile: > The Philippines Senate Committee on Trade and Commerce accused Pepsi of "gross negligence" and noted that Pepsi was involved in a similar fiasco in Chile just a month before the 349 incident. I can't find any details about the Chile incident, but I did find another Pepsi-related giveaway that was newsworthy, this time in the U.S. where they worried about overloading the telephone system: https://www.nytimes.com/1991/01/25/business/the-media-business-pepsi-cancels-big-giveaway.html https://www.nytimes.com/1991/01/25/business/the-media-busine... > As part of its Diet Pepsi commercials during the telecast of the Super Bowl this Sunday, Pepsi had planned to give $1 million to each of three randomly chosen callers to a toll- free telephone number that would be shown during the commercials. But last night the company scrapped the idea. > But the company announced last night that it had canceled the promotion after discussing it with the Federal Communications Commission. "We did not want to do anything that would have even the slightest chance of disrupting our nation's ability to communicate," said David Novak, executive vice president for marketing and sales. > Telephone industry experts had estimated that as many as 50 million calls could flood the nation's telephone network during the promotion.
- T3RMINATED 6y agoBOYCOTT PEPSI!
- petters 6y ago> The number “349” was the $40,000 winning number. > Pepsi had explicitly told its vendor factories not to print this number at all. Sounds dangerous to decide the winning number in advance. Makes it easier for a vendor or someone else to cheat. But I suppose they wanted short numbers.
- mc32 6y agoWorse yet, they told them, “don’t print this number”! However thd vendor misunderstood and mistakenly printed them as the low value payout number, so 800,000 of them... It’s almost like when in a high stress situation you tell someone “don’t press the red button” or on a tight rope “hey don’t look down and lose your balance”
- asutekku 6y agoHow else would you define there to be only two winning numbers then? If you define the winning number afterwards, there’s no way telling how many numbers of those would’ve been in circulation.
- loeg 6y agoMake the winner number outside the normal printed range.
- r00fus 6y agoThis is so obvious - what are the downsides? I mean, it could be easily guessable that the bottlecap is valuable, ruining the surprise. Ultimately they didn't test. Or confirm the vendor's test. It's all Pepsi's fault for a mission critical bug.
- virusduck 6y agoI mean...that's what they tried to do...
- mhb 6y agoMake it a non-number?
- dr_dshiv 6y agoWould the world have been better off if Pepsi had essentially gifted itself to the people of the Philippines?
- smithza 6y agoI have noticed a few comments about the 'clickbaity-ness' of this blog post. Aside from the debate of whether the title of this article is fairly (or truthfully) representative of the content, our tendency towards compelling, exotic and exciting stories reveals much of our human desire for communion with one another. We love a good story that draws us in and pulls us away from reality, if even for a few minutes. I enjoyed the story and grieve the corporate strong-arming. I would not say that the company is ethically vindicated for the collateral: the addictive sugary drinks and desire to wring dry this already-impoverished market for executives living in the U.S. is an ethically irresponsible and selfish venture covered by the ideology of capitalism.
- overthemoon 6y ago> By the end of all the carnage, five people die and dozens more are wounded. All because of a marketing promotion went wrong. Not to rag on the article because the author talks about other factors at the top, but this is a fascinating story that can't really be summed up by a technical goof-em-up, though that's obviously an important part. On the one hand, especially from my western perspective, you have the utter frivolousness of soft drinks and the seeming triviality of the technical error. On the other hand, the subsistence wages of the people rioting and the meaning of a $40,000 promise really stabs at the soul. This was a grotesque fuckup. I truly cannot imagine how it would feel to finally face the prospect of escaping the unfair, crushing cycle of poverty and all its attendant ailments, fears, and anxieties only to have some fucking soda company say "whoopsie here's $18". I'd have burned a truck, too. Or worse, frankly, who knows! I've never lived their life. But it's more than just a goof-up, the offer itself seems depraved to me. Pepsi appeared to have leveraged their own poverty to get them to spend money. Yes, yes, I know, many companies do giveaways here in the states, it's a difference of degree and context. Pepsi's opening move was to exploit a profound and powerful human desire to care for your family in the midst of uncertainty. That in the end it went wrong, due to a technical error or a communication error, seems like a natural consequence, like blowing your hand off while playing with fireworks. You shouldn't have played with them to begin with. Re the riots themselves, I think we in the states have lost a concept of collective human behavior unless it's wrapped in technocratic psychobabble. An organization made a promise that could have changed people's lives, they fucked it up, tried to hide behind a technical error, people were justifiably angry, and people do all kinds of things with justifiable anger.
- danso 6y agoThe Mental Floss writeup from 2018 has actual details: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/558202/pepsi-number-fever-promotion-failure-philippines https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/558202/pepsi-number-feve... > To determine winning numbers, Pepsi recruited D.G. Consultores, a marketing firm based in Mexico. The numbers were generated via computer, then secured in a safe deposit box in Manila. From there, the list would be used to “seed” bottle caps in the bottling plants. Each night, the company would announce the day’s winning number on television. > Quickly, Pepsi executives in the Philippines and stateside convened for an emergency meeting at 3 a.m. on how to proceed. Economically, honoring the perceived value of all of the caps was virtually impossible to justify—it would’ve cost the company tens of billions of dollars. Instead, they opted to declare it a computer error and offered $18 to $20 to cap holders as a “goodwill gesture.” What was originally earmarked to be a promotion with $2 million in total prizes ballooned to $10 million.
- azinman2 6y ago10M is nothing to Pepsi with a market cap of 178B. If they're going to put something out as a token, they could have easily 10-20x'd that and had a much more meaningful payout.
- tedunangst 6y agoPepsi didn't have a market cap of 178B in 1992. As if market cap is even relevant.
- Arcuru 6y agoYour point still stands, but their market cap in May of 1992 when this happened was around 18B.
- smabie 6y agoWhy should Pepsi have spent 100 to 200mm giving people money? Like, that's clearly the wrong decision. People still would have been angry and not bought Pepsi.
- 6y ago
- pretzel_boss 6y agoHere is a news article from when it happened if you don't want to go through medium. https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1993-07-27-1993208127-story.html https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1993-07-27-19932081...
- austincheney 6y agoHaving lived for some time in a third world country that has real poverty and real day to day security worries, situations like this spring to mind when people completely without optics compare their situations to those in developing nations. Yes, as insanely ignorant as that sounds it happens. People here on HN last week, as one example, were trying to compare their experiences recently protesting to the Arab Spring. People in the Arab Spring were lighting themselves on fire and protesting everyday longer than most of us have been locked down from COVID. Not the same, not even in the same universe. The same absurd comparisons also come up when entitled people people try to talk about poverty when it’s clear they have never seen poverty in the US, much less in an economy where people earn less than $5 per day working 5x harder.
- Aloha 6y agoI've always looked at it this way "things must be pretty bad if lighting yourself on fire sounds like a better alternative then living" I dont need to understand the particulars beyond that.
- nitrogen 6y agoI honestly think that there are people in the US who feel distraught enough to do so, but they know that it wouldn't do any good for anyone else -- they would be ignored, or labeled as "crazy". No doubt life in the US is still much better than many other places, but we have to remember that protest itself has been systematically marginalized and penalized as a form of expression, and adjust our evaluation of the state of the US accordingly.
- DevKoala 6y agoSo they suffer enough to want to burn themselves, but won’t because they fear being labeled crazy? I feel that comparing the suffering of such an individual to the suffering of people who actually burned themselves to protest the oppression they experienced is insulting to the sacrifice of the later. I agree with the sentiment of the protests in the USA, but there is no need to invent fictional martyrs who “could have been”.
- lowbloodsugar 6y agoYou'd think the two winning bottles would contain a symbol that the regular factories were incapable of printing.
- forgotmypw17 6y agohttp://archive.is/Syu0j http://archive.is/Syu0j
- Gummaluri 6y agoOn a tangent, the author Sean Kernan is a profilic writer on Quora. https://www.quora.com/profile/Sean-Kernan https://www.quora.com/profile/Sean-Kernan
- mcguire 6y agoPepsi's typo may have triggered riots, but it is very unlikely to have caused them.
- andersco 6y agoMy biggest surprise re. this story is that I don’t recall having seen anything about it in US media. Was I just not paying attention, or was it truly ignored by the likes of the NYT?
- MR4D 6y agoI would love to know what caused the "error". For all we know, this was a brilliant hack attack. (I seriously doubt it, but the possibility can't be discounted.)
- StupidPeople 6y agoHey, rioting idiots are the same around the world. Don't give me money? I'll burn my neighborhood down.
- martingordon 6y agoThis reminds me of the “free iTunes song” promotion Apple and Pepsi ran in ~2005. Some Pepsi bottles had codes under the bottle cap that could be redeemed for a free song; non-winning caps just said “Sorry Try Again”. The mistake Pepsi made was that you could actually make out whether a bottle had a winning or losing cap by looking into the bottle without having to open it (https://methodshop.com/2005/02/hacking-pepsis-itunes-giveaway.shtml https://methodshop.com/2005/02/hacking-pepsis-itunes-giveawa...). You still had to buy the soda to get the free song, but if you’re going to drink soda anyway, spending a minute or two picking a bottle with a free song gave you a nice little bonus.
- londons_explore 6y agoI mean that might have been deliberate... News of how to "cheat" becomes free marketing.
- amelius 6y agoI'd send them a bill. And a debt-collector. But I'm curious, was the marketing campaign successful?
- radu_floricica 6y agoI wish the article had some numbers on Pepsi's income and expected profit in that timeframe. It would really put that 8 mil offer in context. I also think a key point here is the deal Pepsi made with that local market: you buy a lot of Pepsi, and we give you winnings. If they made 100 mils profit due to this campaign I think it's a different situation, ethically, from if they made around 2 mil profit (the amount of the original prize).
- brokenmachine 6y agoYes I would also love to know how much that increase of 5x their market share while running the campaign was worth. I bet it was more than the 8M offered.
- wodenokoto 6y agoMan, if I was Coca Cola I would regularly run ad campaigns in Manila that just said 349 and then a few weeks later something along the lines of “Coke, the taste you can trust” I can’t believe Pepsi actually bounced back!
- YeGoblynQueenne 6y agoHowever, a computer glitch with one of Pepsi’s vendors caused them to manufacture 800,000 bottles with the number “349” on the bottle cap. >> The number “349” was the $40,000 winning number. >> Pepsi had explicitly told its vendor factories not to print this number at all. The two bottles with that number would be specially manufactured and sent to the Philippines by Pepsi themselves. The lucky number that Pepsi had explicitly asked not to be printed not only got printed, but got printed in 800,000 caps? I'm going to wildly speculate here but I'm willing to bet this was no "computer glitch" and someone did it on purpose. Perhaps a disgruntled employee, perhaps someone with good old hacker ethics, like those of Melvin Kaye: The story as written by Nather involved Kaye's work on rewriting a blackjack program from the LGP-30 to a newer Royal McBee system, the RPC-4000; company sales executives had requested to modify the program so that they could flip a front panel switch and cause the program to lose (and the user to win). Kaye reluctantly acceded to the request, but to his own delight, he got the test wrong, and the switch would instead cause the program to win every time (and the user to lose). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Mel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Mel
- abiogenesis 6y ago> By the end of the promotion, 31 million people had participated in the game [1] If we assume that each person bought more than 1 bottle of Pepsi and not all the bottles had been sold by the time the winners were announced, probably a few hundred million bottles were manufactured. So it is not a remote possibility that every number got printed in 800,000 caps. [1] https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/01/10/pepsis-number-fever/ https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/01/10/pepsis-number-feve...
- peter_d_sherman 6y ago>"Pepsi executives decided to do a promotional campaign that promised to have lots of payouts. Each Pepsi bottle cap would have a number that correlated to a prize that would be announced. There were be lots of small winners and then two huge winners of $40,000 each. Pepsi hoped the allure of prize money would convert many of the low-income Coke drinkers. They strategically planned to give out a total of $2M in prizes." [...] "This disruptive campaign increased Pepsi’s market share from 4% to 24.9% in just two months."
- racl101 6y agoSoooo ..... you're saying Filipinos don't like Pepsi?