Tag Archives: soda

What Is That Thing?

17 Jan

January 17, 2014

I recently had the chance to go back and read one of my old blogs, Imponderable #92: At the Carnival. This is the one where some idiot drops over $2,000 on a rigged carnival game in hopes of winning an Xbox and ends up with a stuffed banana. Reading my old blogs can be as painful for me as it can be for you, trust me, even more so, but this one just opened up a mystery for me, something I never noticed before. Here’s the picture I ran with the story.

carny_640

What’s the classy guy drinking? It is clearly a Pepsi but in a weird container, like a normal paper or wax paper cup but sealed like a milk carton on top. I went back to the original, uncropped picture and found that there was a second cup in the scene too.

carny soda crop

Dating the picture is hard. Looking at their high-class threads, this couple could be from anytime between 1969 and infinity. The prizes are a little more help. While it is hard to date the Spider-Man and Superman pictures, the Simpsons didn’t start airing until 1989 and the Dick Tracy movie came out in 1990, so I’m going to date this in the early 1990’s.

I went online to look for that odd soda container but couldn’t find anything even nearly close. The only thing in even the same realm was some even older civil defense containers of drinking water.

watercarton

Any of you ever see soda packaged that way? Because it is sealed it can’t just be something they sold empty and filled, it had to be produced by Pepsi and distributed that way. I have to admit, it does seem like a cool and cheap way to package soda, though I wonder if the soda would eventually eat through the paper, much like it is doing to our stomach linings right now.

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Have 250 Milliliters of Coke And a Smile.

17 Mar

March 17, 2011

Once again they’ve changed the way they present calorie information on packages. Until recently it was good enough if it was on the package in a standardized nutritional display. Now the push is to put it on the front of the packages. Soda bottles are leading the charge.

What’s the point? No one drinks Coke for their health, and if they’re worried about calories they drink diet soda. I have no problem with displaying the nutritional information but it comes to a point where it simply gets insulting. Is it too hard to turn the bottle? Do we really need it shoved in our faces? Has anyone complained that one inch and 90 degrees is too far away?

Of course, all of this assumes that the bottle will be facing you in the cooler. If isn’t, then what happens? Will they design a bottle that rotates itself?

HL Mencken once said the no one has gone broke underestimating the intelligence of the public, and I’ve done my share of it too. And I’m about to do some more. The label, in nice big figures, says 110 calories/250 ml. So for every 250 milliliters there are 110 calories. Fair enough, but it is in a 591 ml bottle. Therefore, the bottle is not 110 calories, as they hope the public will think, it is really 260. A more honest label would tell you the total calories in the bottle. Like it or not, no one will do the math. and if they do, who measures out 110 milliliters?

Remember when you could go out and buy a soda in a small cup that was actually small? Today a small, if you find one, is about the size of a Volkswagen.

Again, I think it is great to give people all the nutritional information they need to make informed decisions. I dislike the fact that this label assumes we are too stupid to figure it out without having everything brought down to the lowest common denominator and shoved down out throats. I find it insulting.

 

The bottle of the future.

 

 

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