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Pepsi’s $32B Typo Caused Deadly Riots

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

#51

Post by bobbiechen »

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'm also surprised that it still happens, considering there was major fraud from an internal actor to claim the highest-paying prizes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonald%27s_Monopoly#Fraud

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

#52

Post by dragonwriter »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #43
capableweb wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 migh…

> But yes, the headline is written in a way to attract clicks, as all headlines are these days.

Except that the attracted readers wouldn't lierally click on anything until news moved to the web, that's been the point of headlines forever.

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

#53

Post by frosted-flakes »

afandian wrote: post #36
ekianjo wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Wrong sugar-water vendor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinaltrainal_v._Coca-Cola_Co . (edit HN is botching the URL. There's a '.' character on the end)

A 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.

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

#54

Post by ponker »

It’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.

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

#55

Post by stickfigure »

capableweb wrote: post #4

Interesting 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 c…

This critique is unnecessarily pedantic. If I issue you a $200 check and (through whatever error) it ends up being written for $200,000,000, we would fairly call it a "$200MM typo" despite the fact that it would bounce.

The headline delivered exactly the story it promised. I was surprised I had never heard about it before.

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

#56

Post by brootstrap »

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 think there is a documentary out now about how that whole thing was gang controlled haha. Havent watched, not sure if i believe, but wouldnt be that far fetched.

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

#57

Post by Udik »

What 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?

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

#58

Post by gambiting »

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

On the other hand - imagine you are a director at Pepsi managing this promotion. Imagine you personally sit down and send an email(or a courier-delivered letter I suppose) to the head of whatever factory is bottling your product, saying "under no circumstances print the number X on the bottle caps". Then the factory prints number X on 800k bottles.

Why is or should Pepsi be responsible for this? If I send an email to someone explicitly telling them not to do something, and they do it anyway - why should I be responsible for it? Unless the bottling factory is their own, but the article doesn't specify.

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

#59

Post by frosted-flakes »

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…

It's still a thing with Tim Hortons' "Roll up the rim to win" campaign, where you can win money, cars, barbecue grills, dougnnuts, or coffee when you buy a coffee.

Actually, it was cancelled this year, because millions of people handing pieces of coffee cup rims to workers isn't good when there's a global pandemic going on.

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