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Pepsi’s $32B Typo Caused Deadly Riots

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

#61

Post by js2 »

Contemporaneous reporting:

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-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.

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

#63

Post by petters »

> 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.

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

#64

Post by hundchenkatze »

duxup wrote: post #5
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…

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.

Interesting, a company's history is about the only reason I'd visit their Wikipedia page.

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

#65

Post by chadly »

gambiting wrote: post #58
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…

That's why executives of big cos get paid big money. They are held accountable (or should be anyway) for the actions of their company. The buck stops with them so to speak.

If the thing is really a big deal, as in this case, maybe the exec should do more than just "send an email" and assume everything is fine.

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

#66

Post by dwaltrip »

gambiting wrote: post #58
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…

Leadership is always responsible. They chose to work with the factory. Where is the vetting? The QA?

Sending an email doesn’t absolve one of responsibility...

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

#67

Post by cdubzzz »

stickfigure wrote: post #55
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.

Eh, I think it's debatable and not pedantic. I literally clicked on the link because I inferred the headline to mean that Pepsi made a typo that somehow cost them $32B.

And re: your example, I would not call that a "$200MM typo", I would call it a typo. If I intended to write a check for $200 and later when it was cashed found I had accidentally wrote it for $220, I would call that a $20 typo.

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

#68

Post by mc32 »

petters wrote: post #63

> 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.

Worse 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”

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

#69

Post by andrewflnr »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #50
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 wa…

You can link to edits. Why don't you show us some of the ones you're talking about?

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

#70

Post by sllabres »

14 wrote: post #48
duxup wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes another 'glitch' and even funnier, because no one was harmed...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_v._Pepsico,_Inc.

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