Pepsi’s $32B Typo Caused Deadly Riots

However, a computer glitch with one of Pepsi’s vendors caused them to manufacture 800,000 bottles with the number “349” on the bottle cap.

>> The number “349” was the $40,000 winning number.

>> Pepsi had explicitly told its vendor factories not to print this number at all. The two bottles with that number would be specially manufactured and sent to the Philippines by Pepsi themselves.

The lucky number that Pepsi had explicitly asked not to be printed not only got printed, but got printed in 800,000 caps?

I'm going to wildly speculate here but I'm willing to bet this was no "computer glitch" and someone did it on purpose. Perhaps a disgruntled employee, perhaps someone with good old hacker ethics, like those of Melvin Kaye:

The story as written by Nather involved Kaye's work on rewriting a blackjack program from the LGP-30 to a newer Royal McBee system, the RPC-4000; company sales executives had requested to modify the program so that they could flip a front panel switch and cause the program to lose (and the user to win). Kaye reluctantly acceded to the request, but to his own delight, he got the test wrong, and the switch would instead cause the program to win every time (and the user to lose).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Mel

Personally, I see the very existence of a designer handbag store as a clear indication of a system that is broken to the core - an insult to unselfish people everywhere.

A designer handbag store to me perfectly exlemplifies a completely broken tax system and citizens being held hostage by a corrupt government and corporations defending their interests.

I sympathize with people who would want to damage that system in any way available to them.

I wouldn't do that particular act myself, but I also recognize that I've been very lucky to not have been one of the people who has suffered at the hands of such a broken system. Lucky I had good parents, good health and good education. The system has failed others, and shows no signs of self-correction without intervention.

"disturbs occurred"! I love that expression!

>"Pepsi executives decided to do a promotional campaign that promised to have lots of payouts. Each Pepsi bottle cap would have a number that correlated to a prize that would be announced. There were be lots of small winners and then two huge winners of $40,000 each.

Pepsi hoped the allure of prize money would convert many of the low-income Coke drinkers. They strategically planned to give out a total of $2M in prizes."

[...]

"This disruptive campaign increased Pepsi’s market share from 4% to 24.9% in just two months."

It's more likely that the "winners" would sue the lotto company for false advertising, breach of contract, and mental distress, and force a much larger settlement - possibly 1000x what was offered ($200k in my example). They might even force the company into bankruptcy. But that option isn't available to poor people in places like the Philippines.

The "multiple winners" thing "makes no sense" to you because you're looking at it from Pepsi's perspective. Not from the perspective of someone who thought their life was going to be transformed, and now it's not. Their thought process is more like "It's not my problem if the people running the lottery screwed up. I won fair and square according to the rules that were set out. They have to pay and that's that."

Pepsi marketed the heck out of this thing, gained a ton of market share, and would stand to make lots of money even after their ultimate $20 million bill. But instead they reneged on a contract by blaming it on a technical error. I don't understand why you're so eager to let them off the hook for this - don't contracts mean anything?

> the alternative being having a new ticket issued for free

There are plenty of other alternatives actually, all the way to "Pepsi actually pays the $32 billion, in installments". But that's not realistic - they'd probably just exit the Philippines market instead.

Here's a more realistic alternative that might have gone over better: Pepsi says, "We get that a lot of you bought Pepsi because of this promotion and we feel terrible. To make it right, we're upping the prize pot to equal all of our sales in the Philippines this year. After all, the only reason we made most of those sales was because of the prize, so we're gonna forfeit those."