Pepsi’s $32B Typo Caused Deadly Riots • Hacker News Board

Re: Pepsi’s $32B Typo Caused Deadly Riots

#21

Post by rootsudo » Thu, Jun 11, 2020, 2:26 PM UTC

Never 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.

Re: Pepsi’s $32B Typo Caused Deadly Riots

#22

Post by BaitBlock » Thu, Jun 11, 2020, 2:29 PM UTC

https://baitblock.app/read/medium.com/better-marketing/pepsi...

Reader mode in case you don't prefer Medium

Re: Pepsi’s $32B Typo Caused Deadly Riots

#23

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jun 11, 2020, 2:29 PM UTC

xchaotic wrote: post #20

Moral 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

[deleted]

Re: Pepsi’s $32B Typo Caused Deadly Riots

#24

Post by kube-system » Thu, Jun 11, 2020, 2:30 PM UTC

sergiotapia wrote: post #18

I 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 tha…

We 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.

Re: Pepsi’s $32B Typo Caused Deadly Riots

#25

Post by sradman » Thu, Jun 11, 2020, 2:33 PM UTC

TLDR; 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

[2] https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19930726&slug...

Re: Pepsi’s $32B Typo Caused Deadly Riots

#26

Post by zerop » Thu, Jun 11, 2020, 2:33 PM UTC

Is 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.

Re: Pepsi’s $32B Typo Caused Deadly Riots

#27

Post by mark-r » Thu, Jun 11, 2020, 2:34 PM UTC

Not 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.

Re: Pepsi’s $32B Typo Caused Deadly Riots

#28

Post by ekianjo » Thu, Jun 11, 2020, 2:35 PM UTC

xchaotic wrote: post #20

Moral 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

> 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.

Re: Pepsi’s $32B Typo Caused Deadly Riots

#29

Post by jjk166 » Thu, Jun 11, 2020, 2:35 PM UTC

slim wrote: post #17

fredley wrote: post #10

I 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...

my 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.

Wouldn'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.

Re: Pepsi’s $32B Typo Caused Deadly Riots

#30

Post by duxup » Thu, Jun 11, 2020, 2:36 PM UTC

Zenbit_UX wrote: post #11

duxup wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is 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.

Really? 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.

I 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.