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Pepsi’s $32B Typo Caused Deadly Riots

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

#71

Post by giarc »

frosted-flakes wrote: post #59
projektfu wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It wasn't cancelled, it was just moved to their app. When you scanned your card/phone you would get credits to "roll up". I only realized when I opened the app (instead of using mobile wallet) and saw I had 25 "roll ups" to use.

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

#72

Post by lostgame »

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…

>> For everybody who was saying "Wikipedia is complete, there's nothing left to write about"

What?!? This is one of the stupider things I’ve heard from this community.

Not only do I find it very suspect that ‘everything has an article’, but these people are aware of new things being discovered and invented, no?

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

#73

Post by arkades »

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…

People think Wikipedia is complete???

I could add stuff in my field of specialty constantly. I just don't want to jump through all the hoops that come with being a wikipedia contributor, so I keep all my notes on a private wiki.

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

#75

Post by [deleted] »

rootsudo wrote: post #21

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 unavailabl…

[deleted]

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

#76

Post by klyrs »

Udik wrote: post #57

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…

Ask that about Canadians, who trashed Vancouver when the Canucks lost a damned hockey game.

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

#77

Post by afandian »

frosted-flakes wrote: post #53
afandian wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

HTTP and e.g. markdown has solved this with angle brackets. I tried that (didn't work), and putting a question mark at the end (also didn't work).

What did work was putting two full-stops, but that was so ambiguous that I left it as-was. Wikipedia has a redirect in place so obviously HN isn't the only one with problems.

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

#78

Post by antris »

cdubzzz wrote: post #67
stickfigure wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How's "Pepsi's mistake cost innocent lives by an exploding grenade"? Technically correct, but sounds even more horrendous and catastrophic, while technically 100% correct. If your argument is that the title is trying to be click-baity they could've probably done a lot worse even while staying with the strict facts. I really don't think the author meant to clickbait.

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

#79

Post by baby »

arkades wrote: post #73
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…

People think Wikipedia is complete??? I could add stuff in my field of specialty constantly . I just don't want to jump through all the hoops that come with being a wikipedia contributor, so I keep all my notes on a private wiki.

This selfish

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

#80

Post by asutekku »

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.

How else would you define there to be only two winning numbers then? If you define the winning number afterwards, there’s no way telling how many numbers of those would’ve been in circulation.
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