Having lived for some time in a third world country that has real poverty and real day to day security worries, situations like this spring to mind when people completely without optics compare their situations to those in developing nations. Yes, as insanely ignorant as that sounds it happens. People here on HN last week, as one example, were trying to compare their experiences recently protesting to the Arab Spring. People in the Arab Spring were lighting themselves on fire and protesting everyday longer than most of us have been locked down from COVID. Not the same, not even in the same universe.
The same absurd comparisons also come up when entitled people people try to talk about poverty when it’s clear they have never seen poverty in the US, much less in an economy where people earn less than $5 per day working 5x harder.
I've always looked at it this way "things must be pretty bad if lighting yourself on fire sounds like a better alternative then living" I dont need to understand the particulars beyond that.
I think there are two ways to approach thinking about dramatic acts like self-immolation, rioting, looting, stealing, etc.
One way is to think "wow, those people have had very different experiences from me, to drive them to do that." I'd put your reply in that category and I prefer this. It recognizes shared commonality among people, which is a good place to start for constructive change.
The other way is to think "wow, those people are nothing like me, to want to do something like that." This treats differences as inherent and implies there are different "types" of people. It creates a sense of "us vs them," which makes it harder to build the empathy necessary for constructive change.
I try to look for primary intent. If somebody is advocating awareness of something worthy of their passion I can empathize with that advocacy even during times I may disagree with the subject advocated. I find it harder to empathize with people who are stealing designer handbags and claiming it’s a form of protest. I just see self enrichment (theft) as the primary motive and then a lie as a qualifier. To me that results in a difference compared to the prior described advocacy group that I cannot shake.
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.
I really agree with you here, except for your inclusion of looters in that group. You're goddamn right opportunistic looters are nothing like me. Those fuckers care nothing about the fight of the protests, and are willing to tarnish the whole movement for some free shit. Fuck them.
Otherwise, right on. I can't tell you how often I come to dead ends in arguments regarding poverty and crime, where folks who've never been poor or desperate give themselves 100% of the credit for their good fortune. Like they picked their fucking parents before birth.
Without the rioting and looting, the protests may have accomplished nothing. Climate March and Women's March were way bigger but led to absolutely zilch.
So if the climate and women's marchers had destroyed blocks of neighborhoods and looted and burned a bunch of stores and small businesses, you think they would have "accomplished" more? Are you fucking serious?
This is such a stupid argument. The only thing violence, vandalism and theft "accomplish" is further retrenchment of police power. It turns otherwise sympathetic people against the protests, and makes it much harder for policy makers to justify police reform to the huge part of the population whose quiet racist and classist biases were just confirmed by the looters.
If anythin's going to spur change from this particular upheaval, it will the hundreds of videos recording police brutality against peaceful demonstrators.
In this post alone, there are people saying that looting is justified... For every person saying that the looters are unrelated, there is another person or two that either condones that behaviour or justifies it.
Either we have looters in this thread, or the movement is a big umbrella that encompasses the unsavourable elements too.
That's a strawman. Nobody's talking about "stealing a TV from a corporation". That's not what looting is. Go spend five minutes on google and see what's been happening. Looters have destroyed thousands of small businesses -- destroying equipment, ransacking the buildings, and in many cases setting them on fire. The theft is only a small part. Many of these losses cannot be be recouped through insurance, and many of these small businesses will die. For nothing.
Looting and vandalism don't hurt corporations. The corporations have insurance and can rebuild. Looting destroys livelihoods of people who often can't recover, accelerates the decay of already struggling neighborhoods.
I think you've hit on a very interesting way of framing the issue. Perhaps it can be explained with (slightly) statistical language:
- Taking the self-immolator's experiences and actions as sample sets, they are different from the 'stereotypical American' by a statistically significant margin.
- This does not mean that the cause is that the self-immolator is categorically different from the 'stereotypical American' (because correlation does not necessarily imply causation), in fact, it suggests that the experiences and actions may be related.
I honestly think that there are people in the US who feel distraught enough to do so, but they know that it wouldn't do any good for anyone else -- they would be ignored, or labeled as "crazy". No doubt life in the US is still much better than many other places, but we have to remember that protest itself has been systematically marginalized and penalized as a form of expression, and adjust our evaluation of the state of the US accordingly.
I have a theory that distribution of power in democracies leads to "distribution of blame".
Living in a third world country means you probably are dealing with a (semi) dictatorship. That means there's only a few entities (eg regime, government, whatever) that you can assign the blame to.
Therefore, you can light yourself on fire in protest to them.
In the U.S. who would you light yourself to protest to? Elected congress? Elected government? Wall Street? Supreme Court?
Unfortunately when system gets rigged and gamed in a democracy it's really difficult to untangle the mess.
This also has a secondary effect: In these countries people are not so divided. They have a common enemy: The dictator [0].
Source: Anecdotal experience based in years of life in a third world country and the U.S.
[0] This is an oversimplification as even the dictators have support of a big chunk of the population to rely on.
> I have a theory that distribution of power in democracies leads to "distribution of blame".
I think there's some truth to this, but I think this eventually results in widespread cynicism, skepticism and loss of trust towards any sort of institution (aka "the system") in general --including science and religion--, which is a perfect environment for fake news and conspiracy theories. Long term it leads to chaos and unrest too.
I think that you are correct that in the long term it leads to chaos and unrest, but I think it also has a slow burn problem that ultimately leads to deep ennui, cynicism, and a feeling of powerlessness that can last many generations. This has the effect of further concentrating power in those who have rigged the system and leads to such an unbalance that maybe when the chaos comes, it won't lead to anything better.
Conversely I think in more volatile arenas, the power dynamics while large, are less so (logically this makes sense because a revolution that can win is closer in power to the system they are fighting). While this volatility may be worse overall in that society, it is less systematically oppressive than say a rigged democracy deeply meshed into a non-democratic economic system.
The more I think about it the more my nihilism takes hold and I find that very disheartening.
So they suffer enough to want to burn themselves, but won’t because they fear being labeled crazy?
I feel that comparing the suffering of such an individual to the suffering of people who actually burned themselves to protest the oppression they experienced is insulting to the sacrifice of the later.
I agree with the sentiment of the protests in the USA, but there is no need to invent fictional martyrs who “could have been”.
No matter what issue you examine, you can doubtlessly find that somebody somewhere at sometime had it even worse. I think these kind of observations are usually unproductive though; taking this attitude to it's logical absurd conclusion would have you telling people to stop complaining because at least they're not in death camps.
This "somebody somewhere" comparison is callous and dismissive. These are billions of people that live under horrid conditions of tyranny and/or abject poverty.
Hundreds of millions of people lived through the Arab Spring - not "somebody somewhere". Many of them watched their country descend in unprecedented violence that cannot be compared to tear gas and pepper spray.
To them, those are indeed first world problems.
Protesters in Syria were slaughtered with machine gun and anti-aircraft fire. Protesters in Iraq were fired on with machine guns. Protesters in Egypt were killed by snipers from the roof tops, exploded in bombs, and then jailed and quietly executed. Protesters in Libya were massacred by the army - and then by terrorists. Protesters in Iran were shot, arrested, and disappear. AND THEN three of those countries fell into civil war.
As bad as things may seem in the US, they don't even compare to what happens in other countries. How many innocent black Americans were killed by police in any given year? 10? out of 300 million people? ....oh, and the police involved have been arrested and charged?
Please forgive the civilians in Syria who were bombed with nerve gas for not sympathizing - their civil war is still going on - almost 10 years now.
Either I have utterly failed to express myself effectively, or this is not a charitable response. I'm not sure which.
I'll try one more time: it should be possible to empathize with the plights of many people, not only the ones who are worst off. Obviously some people have it worse than others, I hope I've made my acknowledgement of that clear. What I don't find productive is telling some people you don't care about their problems because other people have it much worse.
> These are major HUGE segments of the world population that lived
If it was literally every other person in human history other than those in the present day United States...
...it still wouldn't have any bearing on discussion of the injustices in the United States. It's nothing more than an irrelevant distraction technique.
(And while it's a valid example of the general issue, no one before you raised immediate issues IN THE US.)
> Please forgive the civilians in Syria who were bombed with nerve gas for not sympathizing
Literally no one is asking for that. There is a difference between suggesting that, e.g., the Syrian experience you describe is irrelevant as a deflection in a discussion among people who are subject to, and responsible-as-citizens-for-their-governments-actions in the present problems in the US and suggesting that those American problems ought to be a concern for the victims of the violence in Syria.
I would suspect most people in the current American protest movement, while gratified by the support that has been shown in numerous other first world and even some developing nations, weren't looking for international attention and don't particularly think that it ought to be an urgent concern for people who are neither subject to nor responsible, even in the sense of the Democratic responsibility of citizens, for it.
> ...it still wouldn't have any bearing on discussion of the injustices in the United States.
Of course it would. Because our resources for charity and good will should not be solely given to Americans. There are far far more needy people outside America.
It’s not about who has it worse. That completely misses the point. It’s about accurately reflecting on your personal situation and not drawing absurd conclusions to justify a personal opinion. Let’s call this Dunning-Kruger for sympathy.
If you are trying to qualify who has it worse you aren’t focused on a materially objective outcome. For example many of the people protesting in the US in the past few weeks are trying to raise awareness of systemic racism and for police accountability (different issues, by the way). Most of those people aren’t asking for your sympathy because they are looking for impactful change which isn’t found in sympathy.
I think there may be a miscommunication here. I read "The same absurd comparisons also come up when entitled people people try to talk about poverty when it’s clear they have never seen poverty in the US, much less in an economy where people earn less than $5 per day working 5x harder." as meaning you have no sympathy for the plight of poor people in America because people in other countries experience even more severe poverty. Seeing poverty in America is as easy as going outside and opening your eyes.
> Seeing poverty in America is as easy as going outside and opening your eyes.
That so completely depends upon where you live. My big city of 900,000 people reported their highest measured homeless population ever in 2018 with a sizable jump to about 2000 people. That is tiny compared with many other similar sized cities.
Seeing homeless people, like stepping over a drunkard spilled out over a sidewalk, isn’t the same as diving into the research or getting into some of the personal stories.
A man is standing on a beach after a storm with the tide out, where there are thousands of starfish baking in the sun, slowly dying. The man is picking up the starfish one at a time, and throwing them into the ocean.
A bystander is walking by, and says, "Why are you doing that? There are thousands of starfish and it won't make a difference."
The man picks up another starfish and says, "To this one it matters," and throws it into the ocean.
I mean... there is more to poverty than homelessness. I don't believe that anybody in America has never had the opportunity to witness poverty in America.
> By the end of all the carnage, five people die and dozens more are wounded. All because of a marketing promotion went wrong.
Not to rag on the article because the author talks about other factors at the top, but this is a fascinating story that can't really be summed up by a technical goof-em-up, though that's obviously an important part.
On the one hand, especially from my western perspective, you have the utter frivolousness of soft drinks and the seeming triviality of the technical error. On the other hand, the subsistence wages of the people rioting and the meaning of a $40,000 promise really stabs at the soul. This was a grotesque fuckup. I truly cannot imagine how it would feel to finally face the prospect of escaping the unfair, crushing cycle of poverty and all its attendant ailments, fears, and anxieties only to have some fucking soda company say "whoopsie here's $18". I'd have burned a truck, too. Or worse, frankly, who knows! I've never lived their life. But it's more than just a goof-up, the offer itself seems depraved to me. Pepsi appeared to have leveraged their own poverty to get them to spend money. Yes, yes, I know, many companies do giveaways here in the states, it's a difference of degree and context. Pepsi's opening move was to exploit a profound and powerful human desire to care for your family in the midst of uncertainty. That in the end it went wrong, due to a technical error or a communication error, seems like a natural consequence, like blowing your hand off while playing with fireworks. You shouldn't have played with them to begin with.
Re the riots themselves, I think we in the states have lost a concept of collective human behavior unless it's wrapped in technocratic psychobabble. An organization made a promise that could have changed people's lives, they fucked it up, tried to hide behind a technical error, people were justifiably angry, and people do all kinds of things with justifiable anger.
> To determine winning numbers, Pepsi recruited D.G. Consultores, a marketing firm based in Mexico. The numbers were generated via computer, then secured in a safe deposit box in Manila. From there, the list would be used to “seed” bottle caps in the bottling plants. Each night, the company would announce the day’s winning number on television.
> Quickly, Pepsi executives in the Philippines and stateside convened for an emergency meeting at 3 a.m. on how to proceed. Economically, honoring the perceived value of all of the caps was virtually impossible to justify—it would’ve cost the company tens of billions of dollars. Instead, they opted to declare it a computer error and offered $18 to $20 to cap holders as a “goodwill gesture.” What was originally earmarked to be a promotion with $2 million in total prizes ballooned to $10 million.
10M is nothing to Pepsi with a market cap of 178B. If they're going to put something out as a token, they could have easily 10-20x'd that and had a much more meaningful payout.
Why should Pepsi have spent 100 to 200mm giving people money? Like, that's clearly the wrong decision. People still would have been angry and not bought Pepsi.
Well some would argue that it is Pepsi who were giving lottery so any mistake on their part should be on them. Like if you mistakenly deposit 1 million dollar into my account I don't owe you shit and I shouldn't be asked to repay it back legally.
Here off course it depends on the laws of that country. For instance Philippines could certainly have said its your mistake so you owe people money instead. They would have then taken higher steps than that if the company failed to pay back like canceling passports of foreign employees and extradition of executives.
Off course this is all hypothetical but there should be laws that hold companies responsible for their own mistakes.
You think executives should have been extradited from the US to the Philippines to face trial because of this? You think the Philippines should have stolen the employees passports and thrown them in jail and hold them hostage?
And, actually, if someone accidentally deposits 1m into your bank account, you do owe them shit. Specifically, you owe them 1m.
What you're saying is just so ridiculous I'm having a hard time taking you seriously.
Well I said it hypothetically. It all depends on the laws of the country. If Philippines held Pepsi responsible and ordered them to pay the entire amount, it would be a different situation.
If you are ordered to pay money by the government and can't pay it may considered fraud. So the government can take bigger actions. I guess bankruptcy may follow where the government can end up seizing all assets the company has. If all those steps are insufficient then even bigger steps may follow.
As I said it all depends on the laws of that country. Not all countries have similar laws.
Wait, are you saying that you shouldn't have to pay back money accidentally delivered to you? Or is that an argument that a hypothetical person would make?
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!
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.
I have been editing Wikipedia for more than 5 years now. I usually get little push back for the edits I add. I try to keep every sentence cited and use my best judgement with the POV of sources. The worst experience I've had was people deleting content that they viewed through an ethnic chauvinist lens, or someone who strongly believed a statement with little documented evidence (both on the same article.) I keep seeing this viewpoint on HN, but I really thing editing is pretty smooth for most people. There are problems - the visual editor is only visible to those logged in, for example, and there are a good number of rules. But, in general, being bold has been rewarding.
This is largely what's kept me away. I'm comfortable adding piles of sources and citations to pass through some sort of Wikipedia Peer Review-Lite, but if I put in the hard work of creating a repository of knowledge for free and just see it go away...
I've tried contributing once or twice, and my work was erased like marks on the beach, promptly and without explanation. That was enough to ensure I don't do it again.
Perhaps it is the wikipedia administration, moderation, and editing team that have put up such barriers who are selfish. It is selfish to expect others to jump through your hoops to contribute advanced technical knowledge out of the kindness of their hearts.
Just a reminder that you're only assuming that the information that arkades would like to add is even accurate. (No offense to them, I'm sure it is, just pointing out that the process of editing that encyclopedia is burdensome for a reason).
No offense taken. Weeding out for accuracy is a fair and important concern, and there's no reason to assume a random person on the internet is the expert they believe themselves to be.
Though I'd point out that unless wikipedia has a team of people whose expertise equals or at least vaguely approximates my own (or that of any expert that might contribute), I have to raise the question of whether that's really what they're filtering, or simply something that superficially looks like accuracy to someone unfamiliar with the material.
It also assumes that the inaccuracy of the current articles is less than the inaccuracy of articles under a hypothetical alternative moderation policy. That might be true, or it might not - chase away enough contributors and you're left with one-sided, stale information. I imagine that's fine for an article on the simpsons, but maybe not great if you're looking up leukemias.
I do not contribute to wikipedia because I dislike the politics there but I often browse it and see content in technical articles that helped me in the past magically disappearing, or wiki articles getting deleted along with their history because the moderators were too clueless about a certain topic.
And then you end up running into a moderator who just refuses to accept factual well-sourced additions based on their own incorrect knowledge. I'm still bitter from my last attempt to contribute.
Do you contribute to Wikipedia? I have, and to Wikibooks, and it can be a thankless task when you run into an admin who is more interested in formatting than content and more interested in the enforcement of petty rules than in helping the author get it right.
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 war
• Deployment of Agent Orange
• Planned military coups of a number of third world nations
• Their employee (Daniel Ellsburg) leaked the pentagon
papers
And all manner more of cold war controversies and excesses would be better covered, but any attempt to introduce them to the article are almost immediately cleaned from that page (check the edit history).
The history of the RAND corporation is documented, but you aren't going to find that information on Wikipedia.
There is very clearly a PR organization sitting on top of that article scrubbing and sterilizing all the dirty stuff RAND has been involved in.
I started hunting through the edit history which is pretty involved to see if I could find some examples. I notice that MAD is mentioned in the section "RAND Corp".
What about on the Filipino Wikipedia? It's better to translate rather than start from scratch. I think it would be an excellent new English article with a mention on the Pepsi article, if there are enough sources to claim that it's significant enough.
I've noticed that corporate history tends to be a blind spot for Wikipedia. I suspect part of the reason for this is corporate PR departments have more resources than volunteer encyclopedians.
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.
So then let people come to that conclusion on their own after they've read the facts. The Wikipedia content shouldn't imply fault. It just needs to document what actually happened.
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 cost them $32 billion in the end.
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.
Hey there (I'm the author of the piece). I was about to make this exact point. Perfectly said.
As a writer, creating a headline is always a balancing act. You want to drive interest and create curiosity but you also don't want to mislead readers because that will burn them and they'll never read your stuff again.
I felt I delivered on that curiosity. But the internet is a big place. Someone will always find a bone to pick.
I'm new to this site. My Medium stats said I was getting a sudden avalanche of traffic from here so I created an account just to address the initial comment of this thread.
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.
The relevant difference between our examples is not the amount. It's that my example check was cashed and therefore cost me $20. Your example check bounced and didn't cost you anything. If that bounce caused your bank to charge you a $10 fee, I'd call it a $10 typo.
I inferred the headline to mean what it actually did, and was surprised to find comments here like yours. I would even argue that is the true literal meaning.
The fact that it caused riots was especially a giveaway. If Pepsi had actually paid out after making their mistake, why would there be riots? Yes I can imagine situations (e.g. they only paid out after there were deadly riots) but it still leads you to the right interpretation.
BTW I agree that your example is a $20 typo, but that seems unrelated. I would still call it a $20 typo if you then didn't cash in that cheque.
Taken a whole, I can see what you mean about the article title. I think this is a just bad title, but titles are hard (:
> I would still call it a $20 typo if you then didn't cash in that cheque.
Interesting. To me calling something a "$XX [typo|mistake|error|etc.]" means that the typo/error/mistake resulted in a loss of $XX. Any other way to read that feels confusing.
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.
Don't think this is really that clickbaity - the typo amount accounted to 32B, and the outrage caused by that non-existent 32B lead to riots in which people died, in other words, deadly riots.
sometimes things are legitimately outrageous and worthy of an emotionally charged headline.
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 might have written it slightly differently. I don't think it's especially misleading.
It's not a lie though. All the title says is $32B of wealth was accidentally advertised (in this case, prize money based on numbers in a bottle caps). The headline doesn't say it cost Pepsi that amount, it just says the typo (ok, that bit isn't strictly accurate) was for the amount of $32B. A typo isn't the same thing as a payment.
Anecdotally the article was pretty much what I expected from the title: a large amount of wealth was accidentally promised (I assumed by physical property worth $32B and where the quantity was accidentally an order of magnitude more) and Pepsi, like all successful businesses, wormed out of delivering. As it turns out the story was more absurd than the headline lead me to believe but largely it was accurate to my assumptions based on the title.
Moving on from the title: this article did make me wonder what would have happened to the Philippine economy had Pepsi paid out (assuming they had the money to do so). With 800,000 people suddenly winning enough to buy a luxury house, I bet that would have caused house prices to rise massively and likely did all sorts of other massively disruptive things to the economy. Any other theories on this "whatif" scenario?
Pepsi's typo didn't cause 32B of loss to them, but by some measure, there was a tiny, brief window where the country thought it was 32B richer. And this was before the extensive use of the internet, so it probably took weeks for people to discover that they shouldn't have bought that car/house/whatever.
So yes, Pepsi's typo didn't cost them 32B, but 32B of economic value was instantaneously created, and then, after some time, destroyed.
Was its total economic cost 32B? No, but was 32B a reasonable number to state? Sure. Pepsi's 20MM mistake over 32B caused riots seems a lot more wordy, no?
I mean, I don't like Pepsi and understand people being pissed, but going out to protest with hundreds of other 'winners' when its obvious this must be a big mistake is pretty ridiculous. The fact that Pepsi regained market share only shows that its easier for people to bust shit up then boycott a soft drink.
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”
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.
Perhaps they should have instructed the manufacturers to not include numbers which were multiples of, say, 15, but to use all other numbers uniformly.
Random audits (with expensive penalties) could have detected whether the manufacturers had complied with this, without making it too obvious to contestants that the winning number would be a multiple of 15.
The winning bottles could then be manufactured to contain some specific multiple of 15, while still allowing the organisers some freedom to choose which one.
It's not a lottery where people pick their own numbers. As long as you can't find out what it is without opening the bottle, it didn't have to be a number at all; it could just say "you have won" where all the other bottle caps say nothing.
Though, making it non-forgeable might be trickier.
yeah exactly; if I'm with a vendor factory and hear, "Whatever you do, don't print any 349s!" you can damn well bet I've convinced myself what the winning number is.
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 unavailable in Metro Manila, even in BGC/Taguig..where it's corporate head quarters are.
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:
> 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.
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).
> By the end of the promotion, 31 million people had participated in the game [1]
If we assume that each person bought more than 1 bottle of Pepsi and not all the bottles had been sold by the time the winners were announced, probably a few hundred million bottles were manufactured. So it is not a remote possibility that every number got printed in 800,000 caps.
I would love to know what the bug was, sadly we'll probably never know. I imagine the engineer responsible for `NEVER 349` made a mistake that ended up flipping a single bit, to the `ALWAYS 349` position...
I'm going to go with human process error such as the instructions weren't communicated to the right people at the bottling companies and never reached the person who would enter `NEVER 349`.
Classic case of someone communicating a thing and assuming "everyone reads my memos / should do what I say" and not recognizing the complexity of such communication or that maybe there's a proper process to follow.
my guess : they setup a machine that prints the successive numbers inside the bottle caps and there is no way to skip a number, they had to remove them afterwards.. someone simply forgot to do that.
Making 800,000 extra bottle caps and removing them later seems like a plan that wouldn't have left the drawing board. Especially with the risk of fraud from these particular caps.
Wouldn't surprise me if they had a little piston or something to push off every Xth bottle but there was an off-by-one error so they wound up pushing off every bottle with 348 printed instead, or perhaps they had to restart the line once and no one told the engineer to adjust for it so the place was off after that.
1996 in Argentina, Coke did a promotion where promised "two caps for a Ramones concert ticket" (we are huge fans here). Of course they didn't can keep with this promise and disturbs occurred:
Clickbait, yes.
To be fair, though, the top image is frequently stock photos, and they probably just did a search for riot or something and picked the first result.
This reminds me of the “free iTunes song” promotion Apple and Pepsi ran in ~2005. Some Pepsi bottles had codes under the bottle cap that could be redeemed for a free song; non-winning caps just said “Sorry Try Again”.
You still had to buy the soda to get the free song, but if you’re going to drink soda anyway, spending a minute or two picking a bottle with a free song gave you a nice little bonus.
You'd think maybe as they were being printed you'd record the actual number being printed on the side somewhere and audit that every once in a while...
TLDR almost every piece was a winner instead of just a few rare ones.
I managed to mail in a few pieces before the packages got recalled, I remember being in multiple class action suits and getting multiple waves of settlement checks and coupons for free food over the next few years. Obviously I was not going to get 4 vans, 12 bicycles, and 10 skateboards.
Contests now regularly use the "Kraft Clause" to avoid this problem.
"“If due to a printing, production or other error, more prizes are claimed than are intended to be awarded for any prize level, the intended prizes will be awarded in a random drawing from among all verified and validated prize claims received for that prize level. In no event will more than the stated number of prizes be awarded.”
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 that here. Then again I haven't had soda in the same amount of time.
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 actually surprised it still happens.
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.
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.
I wish the article had some numbers on Pepsi's income and expected profit in that timeframe. It would really put that 8 mil offer in context. I also think a key point here is the deal Pepsi made with that local market: you buy a lot of Pepsi, and we give you winnings.
If they made 100 mils profit due to this campaign I think it's a different situation, ethically, from if they made around 2 mil profit (the amount of the original prize).
>"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."
My biggest surprise re. this story is that I don’t recall having seen anything about it in US media. Was I just not paying attention, or was it truly ignored by the likes of the NYT?
Is it just me or others also think that medium has really spoilt our reading experience on the web... they are putting anything behind paywall, without author's consent...
This is not what we wanted Medium to become.... Please stop publishing to Medium.
Man, if I was Coca Cola I would regularly run ad campaigns in Manila that just said 349 and then a few weeks later something along the lines of “Coke, the taste you can trust”
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?
There was indeed stupidity and wickedness but it started with Pepsi, when they ran an unlicensed lottery and then fucked it up. By advertising the $40k prize for the winning number and then reneging on the prize, Pepsi engaged in false advertising, and breaking a contract. If they ever pulled that in the US they'd face a hefty FTC penalty (or at least would have done at the time; today, who knows?)
> Would they not realize that receiving all almost $20 was a larger collective gain?
You come off as out of touch and insensitive with that comment. A "larger collective gain" means fuck-all to people living in abject poverty. Each of the winners, in their mind, lost $38,980 - more money than they could hope to save up in a lifetime. In poor countries the competition for everything is cutthroat and there's often no collective "national spirit". People will help their friends, neighbors and family and that's about it.
Why don't you tell me how you'd feel if you won a $100 million lotto jackpot (after playing for years) and then 2 days later someone told you "oopsies our bad, here's $200."
> Each of the winners, in their mind, lost $38,980 - more money than they could hope to save up in a lifetime.
Yes. Then as soon as they meet all the people that have made the exact same win they must realise something is wrong, right?
> Why don't you tell me how you'd feel if you won a $100 million lotto jackpot (after playing for years) and then 2 days later someone told you "oopsies our bad, here's $200."
Sure. I'd feel enraged, but once I'd discovered that everyone else won the same lotto jackpot it would be totally clear it was a mistake and it makes no sense at all to claim it. I'd be happy to have the jackpot divided in equal parts among all those who bought the winning ticket (the alternative being having a new ticket issued for free and a new turn played- so much less chances to gain anything).
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."
You have to imagine people in poverty and a sum that is not only poverty-ending, but probably allowing you to live in relative luxury, probably allowing you to start a business to have a better source of income. Assuming you're an American not living in a leaky tin-roofed cardboard box in 2020, sure, for you $40,000 is not that sum of money, but in early 1990's Philipphines it probably was...
You can simply multiply that sum by 100 or 1000 and ask yourself how would you react if the same happened to you. In this order:
1) you buy several Pepsi
2) you discover you won 40 million
3) you discover everyone else won 40 million
4) it is explained to you that there was a mistake and you can get 100 dollars as a refund.
5) you start burning cars and throwing bombs together with all the others because each really really wants his 40 million.
Do you think you would go from 4 to 5? Do you think your society would work if it contained a large percentage of people who would go from 4 to 5? That's what I was trying to point out.
No you can't multiply it by a number and say it's comparable...
If I don't win 40 million, I'll still have a warm apartment, a well paid job, a car, electronic toys, and a vague plan of a leisure trip to Iceland after this whole pandemic blows over. Once in a while I'll say "Fuck, at one point I thought I was a multi-millionaire, but it was a mistake!", and I'd be able to distract myself by, I don't know, playing Xbox or going out drinking overpriced cocktails with friends.
Meanwhile a lot of the Filipinos probably thought they'd get to no longer live in a cardboard box in a slum, no longer wear ratty clothes, worrying about work and food... And we don't know how many rioted, presumably many cried quietly after having their dreams quashed..
I'm sorry they weren't all clear-headed zen monks who could accept the loss of their presumed liberation from poverty (in some minds maybe even a return to poverty?) without releasing any anger.
If only the whole world was like you right, I'd bet it'd be an easier to place to govern, right?
There is no way to make them happy. Pepsi clearly didn't have $32B. The only conclusion you can make from this situation is that these people clearly didn't want to be happy.
> [May 25, 1992] As part of PepsiCo's local promotion titled Number Fever, it was announced that the person who possessed the Pepsi bottle cap with the Number 349 is eligible to claim the 1 million peso prize. About 800,000 were eligible for the prize instead of an intended single winner. Several protests and bombings followed after Pepsi refused to award the 1 million prize to thousands of bottle cap holders and said that a computer glitch caused the incident. [2]
I have noticed a few comments about the 'clickbaity-ness' of this blog post. Aside from the debate of whether the title of this article is fairly (or truthfully) representative of the content, our tendency towards compelling, exotic and exciting stories reveals much of our human desire for communion with one another. We love a good story that draws us in and pulls us away from reality, if even for a few minutes.
I enjoyed the story and grieve the corporate strong-arming. I would not say that the company is ethically vindicated for the collateral: the addictive sugary drinks and desire to wring dry this already-impoverished market for executives living in the U.S. is an ethically irresponsible and selfish venture covered by the ideology of capitalism.
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
> if you are a big multinational company you can literally get away with murder
Pepsi's cockups are no doubt the catalyst of the events that unfolded but can you say that they are responsible for someone murdering someone else during what happened? are any actions the protestors undertake in anger the responsibility of Pepsi?
Pepsi made a mistake that disappointed some folks, nobody lost anything because of what Pepsi did directly, Pepsi wasn't assisting anyone in committing a crime, they weren't out to commit a crime / help anyone commit crime like you describe.
not the same as a get away driver is still part of the organised action.
I would say a better, or atleast much more controversial example is this - you cannot hold BLM movement responsible for the people that loot and burn, for exactly the same reason pepsi isn't accountable - because these actions (promises made -> not delivered -> riot started) are causated, but they are not correlated.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The same absurd comparisons also come up when entitled people people try to talk about poverty when it’s clear they have never seen poverty in the US, much less in an economy where people earn less than $5 per day working 5x harder.