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Comment by joering2 | Hacker News Reader

1 in 50,000,000 is still better odds than “winning” a Harrier Jet.

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

It really grinds my gears that Pepsi won that case on the basis that no reasonable person would really believe you could get a jet. I believed you could get a jet. Granted, I was maybe ten years old, but so was the kid in the ad who won it.

Not that I thought I'd ever get the jet myself. It just didn't really stand out as ridiculous when a mere mountain bike required 2,750 points. A 24-pack of Pepsi was worth 4 points. So, you'd need to drink roughly 16,500 cans of Pepsi for the bike. Or 45 cans per day for a year. It all seemed effectively impossible to me.

But, somebody figured out how it could be achieved. That's amazing. I'd pefer they held Pepsi to their word on that one, but I would have settled for a big fine for marketing their product through lying to children.

There's a reason why most contests state that you have to be 18 to participate.

It's generally overlooked for free fries but for real prizes you need an adult to claim them. Like teenagers that sneak in to a casino - they can win a few hundred bucks but if they win a big prize there will be a demand for ID, they'll be kicked out, and no prize awarded.

Kids can't be encouraged to gamble because they aren't going to make mature decisions.

Seems like they should need to prevent kids from seeing the marketing or prevent kids from buying the products that are associated with the contest. If kids aren't mature enough to decide whether or not to participate in the contest, they also aren't mature enough to realize that they aren't allowed to participate.

In both cases it seems we're comfortable exposing children to harms of gaming but not to giving them the prizes they've won at gaming? And this is viewed as better for the children? Pull the other one.

The entire soda and junk food industry makes its money by lying to children to instill bad habits as they grow into indults.

When I was a kid Coke had this "red tab" contest where one of the prizes was tickets to a local amusement park. My parents did the math and discovered that it was cheaper to buy the coke cans for the tickets than to buy them directly. So for the summer we had a gigantic stack of cans in the middle of our entryway. In the end we had to pull the tabs off of full cans because there was no way we could drink that much soda in just a couple of months.

The amusement park was a lot of fun.

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