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Pepsi’s $32B Typo Caused Deadly Riots

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

#41

Post by duxup »

Retric wrote: post #39
have_faith wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you are a big multinational company you can literally get away with murder Pepsi's cockups are no doubt the catalyst of the events that unfolded but can you say that they are responsible for someone murdering someone else during what happened? are any actions the protestors undertake in anger the responsibility of Pepsi?

Shared culpability is a common thing in the law. A get away driver is not directly robbing a bank, but they still go to prison.

I think that's way too distant a comparison.

Pepsi made a mistake that disappointed some folks, nobody lost anything because of what Pepsi did directly, Pepsi wasn't assisting anyone in committing a crime, they weren't out to commit a crime / help anyone commit crime like you describe.

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

#42

Post by abofh »

capableweb wrote: post #37
cat199 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don'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.

It 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.

Pepsi'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?

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

#43

Post by jrochkind1 »

capableweb wrote: post #37
cat199 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don'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.

It 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.

If it was only $20M, they probably just would have paid it, avoiding riots. What caused riots was their unwillingness/inability to pay the $32B they had inadvertantly promised.

I think the $32B is appropriate in the headline, it's the number that they accidentally promised, and could not deliver on, causing the riots.

But yes, the headline is written in a way to attract clicks, as all headlines are these days. I might have written it slightly differently. I don't think it's especially misleading.

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

#44

Post by tifadg1 »

Retric wrote: post #39
have_faith wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you are a big multinational company you can literally get away with murder Pepsi's cockups are no doubt the catalyst of the events that unfolded but can you say that they are responsible for someone murdering someone else during what happened? are any actions the protestors undertake in anger the responsibility of Pepsi?

Shared culpability is a common thing in the law. A get away driver is not directly robbing a bank, but they still go to prison.

not the same as a get away driver is still part of the organised action.

I would say a better, or atleast much more controversial example is this - you cannot hold BLM movement responsible for the people that loot and burn, for exactly the same reason pepsi isn't accountable - because these actions (promises made -> not delivered -> riot started) are causated, but they are not correlated.

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

#45

Post by duxup »

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...

So many possibles.

Complete speculation / personal bias theory:

I'm going to go with human process error such as the instructions weren't communicated to the right people at the bottling companies and never reached the person who would enter `NEVER 349`.

Classic case of someone communicating a thing and assuming "everyone reads my memos / should do what I say" and not recognizing the complexity of such communication or that maybe there's a proper process to follow.

I run into that a lot.

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

#46

Post by nrmitchi »

projektfu wrote: post #33
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…

When 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 a…

I mean, it was also kind of a giant fraud (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonald%27s_Monopoly#Fraud), which may have contributed to it being less of a big thing these days.

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

#47

Post by sidewndr46 »

projektfu wrote: post #33
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…

When 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 a…

I 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

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

#48

Post by 14 »

duxup wrote: post #30
Zenbit_UX wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It 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.

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

#50

Post by throwaway2048 »

9nGQluzmnq3M wrote: post #3

For 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&... Edit: I stand corrected, there is a single paragraph in here. Nothing standalone/linkable though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_in…

Controversial stuff, even well documented controversial stuff, gets scrubbed from Wikipedia all the time.

Check out 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.

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