By Michael Blanding
Ebook
This quote below from Chapter One refers to Coke's early origins as a patent medicine "One of the most notorious showmen, Clark Stanley, publicly killed hundreds of rattlesnakes to advertise his Snake Oil Liniment, which was eventually discovered to be little more than camphor and turpentine—forever making the term “snake-oil salesman” synonymous with fraud."
This from Chapter Two referring to Nazi Coke "When supplies of concentrate ran out, he created a new grapefruit-flavored beverage, naming his new concoction “Fanta,” and using forced labor from concentration camps to produce it. He stopped short only of changing the name of the company, risking death at the hands of a Nazi general when he refused."
A sordid past indeed.
And then then Pepsi challange caused Coke to add more sugar to be more like Pepsi (ya can't make this stuff up). The move proved to be both a disaster and a blessing to Coke.
Here we have the day. "Company executives stood up before a packed press conference on April 23, 1985, forever after known as “Black Tuesday” among the Coke faithful. Unfortunately for Coke, word of the change had already leaked. The day before, Pepsi had taken out a full-page ad in The New York Times declaring victory in the Cola Wars with the statement “The Other Guy Just Blinked.” Two books with yhis title appeared at this time.
I remember this. I remember thinking what the hell is the big deal. But for Pepsi I guess it was. Pepsi declared itself winner of the cola wars. However Coke returned to the old formula and returned to its' dominant position.
These guys take their sugar water very seriously. There's this:
"For the first time, average Americans began putting their money into the market in significant numbers—either on their own or through the vehicles of mutual funds or pension funds. These institutional investors began to push for higher and higher returns, and companies obliged them, focusing everything on their quarterly earnings statements in a new emphasis that became known as the “shareholder value movement.” The idea dates back to an obscure 1975 book by economist Alfred Rappaport. But the philosophy was articulated most famously by Jack Welch, the CEO of General Electric, who declared in 1981 that plodding growth of “blue chip” companies was no longer good enough for him. Instead, he pushed GE’s earnings into high gear by cutting waste and inefficiency wherever he found it—including downsizing through massive layoffs.
[And so began the "screwing of the American working class" movement-thanks Jack]
He set the tone for other companies, who rushed to please Wall Street by any means necessary—including accounting tricks, stock buybacks, and rampant acquisitions of other companies. Flush with stock options, CEOs profited handsomely, even as they sometimes hurt the long-term success of their companies through an emphasis on short-term growth." A practice that continues today. The corporations bend over backwards for new customers while the aggrieved existing customers exit in droves. Can't they see that there is no future in this practice. Corporate America hello keep your loyal customers happy. And I donr mean with after transactions surveys. This only serves to demonstrate further your contempt. Its starts with payingnyour employees anliving wage so they feel like they have a stake in the outcome. You get what you pay for and if you pay dirt wages you will continue to get dirty output. And godammit I want a real person to answer the phone. I'm fed up with your endless answering computer trees and I will start voting with my purchasing power by utilizing only companies who can get these few basic concepts of business right. [Wow Ed that mighty fine looking high-horse, shut up I mean it lol].
So now the low price of corn (subsidized by our largess [your tax dollars at work] made for a cheap surplus. And when someone figured out how to make.sugar out of itt (forgive me Mr Burke) was the day the universe changed. The author gives us this:
For decades, the price of sugar still kept a lid on how big Coke was able to go. That changed in the 1980s when Japanese scientists invented high-fructose corn syrup. Unlike sucrose—subject to the whims of international sugar markets—the new sweetener could be made here at home, where corn subsidies keep the prices at rock-bottom levels. “Cheap corn, transformed into high-fructose corn syrup,” wrote Michael Pollan in 2003, “is what allowed Coca-Cola to move from the svelte 8-ounce bottle of soda ubiquitous in the ’70s to the chubby 20-ounce bottle of today.” Coke rolled out a 50 percent high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) version of its trademark beverage in 1980, delighted to discover that consumers couldn’t tell the difference. In 1985, it switched to a 100 percent HFCS version.
Uh! Not so fast there. You can tell the difference, its subtle granted but there is a difference. My lil, brother, an avid Coke.drinker, got a hold of.some.from Mexico where they still use sugar and he assures me the difference is.plain. And we would find out later the untoward effects of adding corn sugar to everything. This would be the genesis of the Diabetes and obesity epidemic that would.soon sweep America. But hey Coke got a cheap sweetner....sweeet.
A quick search online show many places now selling "real sugar" Coke. So yeah they did notice Coke and they are.paying more to get it. Time to roll out a new Coke?...ha! Just kidding.
Lets hit this horse one more time I think he's still breathing. There's this:
"As Eric Schlosser describes in Fast Food Nation,
[A great book btw which I highly recommend ]
in the 1990s a 21-ounce medium soda at McDonald’s sold for $1.29, while a 32-ounce large soda sold for only 20 cents more. But the cost for ingredients was only 3 cents more—for 17 cents of pure profit. Everyone won—
[In the long run we actually lost (not weight mind you) but we the consumer lost]
the customer got exponentially more soda, the restaurant got more profit, and the company sold more syrup. And if that wasn’t enough, customers could request to “supersize” their drinks—a stomach-busting 64 ounces and 610 calories a pop. By 1996, supersizing accounted for a quarter of soft drink sales. (It was the same story at the 7-Eleven chain of convenience stores, which introduced the 32-ounce Big Gulp, the 44-ounce Super Gulp, the 52-ounce X-Treme Gulp, and finally the 64-ounce Double Gulp.
[I remember Dennis Miller commenting on the size of drinks in this period "And have you seen the size of the sodas now? I could dock my Hobie Cat in there."
The true champion, however, was “The Beast,” an 85-ounce refillable cup released by Arco service stations in 1998.)"
The beast indeed.
This was all a part of the 80' super abundant glutinous culture that would come back to bite us in our now fattened asses.
But even today that legacy remains. When I go the the local movie house I get a snack and I want to get a small soda (which I fell is still too big for me really) to wash it down. The guy always tells.me thats it's acctually cheaper to buy the big soda. Imagine that? Its actually cheaper to get the oversized monstrosity. I say yes I dont care. Give me the small one anyway. But I don't see many others doing that.
"In 1994, Coke began introducing a new 20-ounce bottle, fashioned from polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic in Coke’s trademark “contour” shape—a variation on the old green-glass hobbleskirt bottle. It quickly replaced the 12-ounce can to become the standard serving size for Coke."
More coke please! Oh and did you notice here we have the introduction of the planet killing PET bottle from our corporate overlords. Not only will we destroy our own health with this devils brew but now we can also destroy the whole planet as well. Yea! More Coke!
Eventually they put the classic shape on the 2 liter bottle as well. I remember seeing that and thinking wow that's cool. I didnt make me buy Coke (Pepsi man here) but I did think it was pretty cool nonetheless.
19.1% We are definely getting fatter. This on that:
"Every day , it seems, there’s new evidence of America’s expanding waistline—from a policy on Southwest Airlines requiring customers to buy two seats if they are going to spill over from the eighteen inches allotted in one, to the motorized carts Wal-Mart now offers for people too large to amble around the store by themselves. [There are many signs of our gluttony in the aisles of Wal-Mart] In medical terms, a person is obese when his or her body mass index (BMI) tops 30.2 And after holding steady for much of the last century, the percentage of American adults checking that box has more than doubled, from 14 percent in the 1970s to 34 percent today, translating into some 75 million people.
Another 34 percent of adults with a BMI over 25 are classified as “overweight,” placing more than two-thirds of the adult U.S. population into one of those two categories. And along with those statistics come increased risks for diseases such as high blood pressure and heart disease. The prognosis for the next generation is just as bad, with the percentage of obese teenagers more than tripling, from 5 percent to 18 percent over the past thirty years, and the number of obese children climbing to 20 percent.
Bleak indeed.
The backlash was coming and Coke was due for its comeuppance. This from our author:
20.5% "The opening salvo was fired by a nonprofit group called the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), which released a report about soda in 1998 called Liquid Candy that teased out the connections between soda and health issues...
Below is the graphic from the cover of the CSPI report. Pretty easy to see who they blame. As Adbusters will tell you that branding they love so much can be turned agaisnt them quite easily. Coke is not printed on the bottle but that distinct "hobbleskirt" bottle tells us immediately whose it is.
"No one talked about obesity.” The report would change that—drawing the connection for the first time between the corresponding rise in soda sales and obesity rates over the previous twenty years, and sparking a debate that eventually spilled out into a national backlash against sugary soda."
"[The] CSPI was founded in 1971, one of the first of the many “public interest” groups that proliferated in a period that business historian David Vogel calls the last of the “three major political waves of challenge to business that has taken place in the United States in [the twentieth] century” (the first two being the Progressive Era and the strong push by organized labor in the post-Depression 1930s). Groups such as the Sierra Club, Common Cause, and Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen used any means possible to curb the power of big business at a time when public support for corporations was at a low ebb."
Back then we had a better chance than today of reigning them in and the task appears monumental. But I assure intrepid reader we can make them take notice. Yes we can.
"...when CSPI did an update of Liquid Candy in 2005, the percentage of calories from soft drinks in the average person’s diet had gone up 25 percent.)
The report was catnip to the media, which ran story after story about the findings—singling out Coke more often than Pepsi as a harmful substance fed to youth. The Coca-Cola Company sat back silently, even as its surrogate, the National Soft Drink Association, aggressively contradicted CSPI’s claims. “Soft drinks make no nutritious [sic] claims,” said a spokesperson for the trade group. “We are simply one of the nice little refreshments people can enjoy as part of a balanced diet.”
Cue the lightning strike! Lmao Balanced diet ha!
30.3% Now on to the 800lb gorilla bottled water. Bottled water, although marketed as a.pure solution to water, has been found again and again to be no more pure that tap water. Let me be the first to tell you it's ok to start drinking your tap water. In many cases it's actually more pure than that water you are payimg for. Its not necessary to buy water. In fact its counterproductive. The more you buy and the less tap you use will leave less impetus to keep our tap water supplies clean. Stop paying for water. Inspite of the "preferred advertisement" on facebook with Poland Spring with the "mountain stream" on the bottle it not true. It's called marketing ,(I call it plain old manipulation). Turn on your bullshit detector and put on your hip - waders, cause Nestle is slinging it with this one. And I stand there staring outraged at the unmitigated gaul of Nestle with the help of Facebook invading my space...a friend likes it. You like it? Are you f'n kidding me? You like it? You like being force fed advertising or do you like rapine and theft of natural resources. Which is it cause im confused. Want to find out what a good neighbor Nestle (the parent company of Poland Spring) is just ask someone from Maine. They will tell you the real story about these blackgaurds.
This from the author:
"A classic study by the Natural Resources Defense Council of more than one thousand bottles of water in 1999 found that while most samples were safe, nearly a quarter tested above state standards for bacterial or chemical contamination (only 4 percent violated weaker federal standards). More recent studies have continued to find problems: In 2000, the American Medical Association found some bottled water had bacterial counts twice the level of tap. A 2002 study by the University of Tuskegee of brands including Dasani, Aquafina, and Poland Spring found mercury, arsenic, and other chemicals above the EPA limits. A 2004 study by the FDA found low levels of perchlorate, a derivative of rocket fuel, in samples of spring water. As recently as 2008, the nonprofit Environmental Working Group (EWG) found thirty-eight different pollutants in bottled water, ranging from bacteria to fertilizer and Tylenol, and concluded that consumers “can’t trust that bottled water is pure or cleaner than tap water.” (The study did not reveal the types of water it tested, saying only that they were “popular” brands.)"
30.3% This on the so-called "halo effect" where corporations try to pretend they actually care:
"Of course, there were limits to what a corporation could do—since legally its obligations were to increase profit for its shareholders, not spread its wealth to solve the world’s problems. Henry Ford had found that out in 1916, when his Ford Motor Company was sued for using profits to give discounts to customers instead of dividends to shareholders. The judge in the case sided against him, ruling that “a business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of its stockholders.” It’s that principle that has caused Joel Bakan to argue that corporations are essentially “pathological” entities—maximizing profit at the expense of any other good—whether workers’ rights, environmental improvements, or even its own customers’ pocketbooks. “The corporation’s legally defined mandate is to pursue, relentlessly and without exception, its own self-interest regardless of the often harmful consequences it might cause to others,” he writes."
Yep that about sums it up
58.4% There's this:
"Despite the growing attention Plachimada was receiving in the international press, the local activists in Kerala were skeptical of being co-opted by international nonprofits who wanted to use the fight to push their own issues."
This statement above is telling. The whole "help" industry is in itself an industry. They will deliver help but it will be their way only and while.they push their own agendas.
Excellent book
Books:
Constance Hays in her book The Real Thing: Truth and Power at the Coca-Cola Company. As
David Michaels: Doubt Is Their Product
Michele Simon: Appetite for Profit
Elizabeth Royte: Bottlemania
Maude Barlow Blue Gold, Blue Covenant and Blue Future (also she has a documentary called Blue Gold)
Nantoo Banerjee, Cokes Bumpy RidenThrough India
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