When Pepsi Had a Navy
lflank.wordpress.com
lflank.wordpress.com
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/soviet-union-pepsi-shi...
It's rewritten paragraph-by-paragraph, probably automatically using "rewriting tools" that blog spammers use to plagiarize articles. You can tell because the story follows the same threads from paragraph to paragraph.
also after skimming the atlas obscura article, I have to say I wish I read that instead. Better prose and a lot more images than the plagiarized version.
It was obviously a joke. No reasonable person would not see that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PHcdn8R4d4
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Nalls
https://brobible.com/life/article/ret-usmc-art-nalls-harrier...
https://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/he-didnt-retire-he-started...
Just because someone can afford one doesn't mean it's not clearly a joke that it isn't really the prize for a soft drink competition. The court agreed.
It might be different if Pepsi had offered a flying unicorn, a human slave, psychic powers, a teleporter, a time machine, a genie with 3 wishes, a seat in congress, or a fully operational death star.
The best argument you could make for Pepsi's failure would be that the jet was more restricted at the time. If acquisition hit legal difficulties, the judge should have forced Pepsi to make a substitution of greater cost. It should hurt. For example the Boeing 747 is a real jet that could be purchased freely at the time.
It was tested in court. They didn't agree this was reasonable. I don't think it would be reasonable either.
Tech people think law is like maths with absolutes - it's not - there's a big test in law of 'come on is that really what a reasonable person would think - use your common sense' and this fails that.
This isn't "tech thinking in math ways". This is plain and simple ethics: Pepsi purposefully lied to people, by making an offer they didn't intend to honor - and then they weaseled out of it when someone actually took them up on their offer. Offer is IMO completely reasonable, for the reasons 'burfog gives. If Microsoft or Google advertised a contest in which the prize is a Falcon 9, I would consider this a believable offer too, because they can totally afford it, probably just out of margins on the sales increase they'd get for announcing the contest.
How many times a day to you ‘purposefully lie’ to people when telling a joke? Do they all sue you?
Lying to people for your benefit only to later defend yourself with "it was just a joke!" after they take you seriously isn't jesting; it's plain assholery.
When people started sending in their bottle labels en masse, it turned out that the company never expected anyone to actually aim for the prize. Pepsi representation tried to weasel out by changing the rules thrice. In the end, they had to bow down to the consumer protection officials and sent out a newer generation Vaio as they could not source enough of the model they advertised.
Hoover made £30m in extra sales, and had to spend £50m on flights, and unknown compensation. TV programmes were made, court cases filed, board execs were fired and Hoover UK sold to the Italians.
This is impressive, but it seems to understate Hoover's problems pretty dramatically. The Wikipedia article says this:
> at this point the consumer response increased enormously, as Hoover was offering around £600 of airline tickets for an outlay of just £100. Customers opted to purchase the cheapest product that was enough to satisfy the £100 requirement, with some not even bothering to pick up the product they had purchased. The Hoover factory had to switch to seven-day working and hire additional employees to meet the demand for the cheapest qualifying vacuum cleaner.
This sounds like a lot of additional expense in labor and materials, all of which was basically wasted.
Yes I think that's the point of the story.
But that sounds like a 20 million pound loss most of which was wealth transfer (from Hoover to you!) rather than wealth destruction. In fact, because of the sideshow in ordering unwanted vacuum cleaners, the loss was apparently much larger and mostly wealth destruction rather than wealth transfer.
As a brand they were constantly appearing on the news, and consumer affairs programmes for weeks, months eventually years. Hoover people were flying in from the US, etc.
All because they expected a similarly low takeup rate as their earlier European offer.
The offer bit is a great opportunity to cite Carbolic Smoke Ball https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlill_v_Carbolic_Smoke_Bal...
For example, Apple advertises an iPhone as "twice as fast for half the price"? They say no reasonable person would believe that [1]
Or Vitaminwater says the drink "could promote healthy joints, support optimal immune function, and reduce the risk of eye disease"? They claim no reasonable person would believe vitaminwater was a healthy drink [2]
I mean, this seems like a hole in the law that you can drive a truck through.
[1] https://www.wired.com/2008/12/apple-says-cust/ [2] https://www.businessinsider.com/coca-cola-glacau-vitaminwate...
This is just a standard legal tactic to have every option available (including puffery) if the suit moves forward. And for that claim any reasonable judge would have disagreed but they can include it if they want to really pursue it.
And that lawsuit was dismissed because the limiting factor were flaws with the AT&T network, not the device.
I agree with the overwhelming sentiment of your claim, but at the same time there are consumers who go out of their way to be "mislead" because it can be a profitable venture.
Apple's initial defense covered
virtually every possible defense
in such a case.
Any competent lawyer is going to reach for every available defense that seems vaguely plausible, but they're unlikely to win. A quick search makes it look like although Coca Cola only had to pay a $1.2M fine in this case the defense that no reasonable person would believe their advertising was rejected.
> Coca-Cola fought back arguing that no reasonable consumer could be misled into thinking vitaminwater was a healthy beverage but last year a federal judge rejected this defense.
https://www.truthinadvertising.org/tina-org-objects-unhealth...
Personally, I think that's always wrong and this should be by default judged in favour of the customer taking them up on an offer. Advertisements aren't random remarks thrown off the cuff.
I'm kind of upset when some company does something that requires a tiny bit of common sense and faces consequences on the grounds that people with heads full of air get the wrong idea. We are humans, with judgment, not mindless robots, and I believe society should acknowledge that.
Sure, here, the target is high school kids, but what is the risk? It's not like one of them is going to buy a jet fighter. If there is a problem with that ad, it is that it encourages an unhealthy diet by making kids drink Pepsi.
Also note that here, we are talking about a guy who was able to build a scheme that is far from obvious. He even wrote a $700k certified cheque for that. Two possibilities: either Leonard was too insane to handle that kind of money, or, more likely, he tried to exploit an loophole for profit. In some countries, that could be considered fraud.
> Pepsi a fleet of 17 obsolete Soviet Navy diesel attack submarines along with a decommissioned cruiser, destroyer and frigate, as well as a number of new civilian oil tankers. At a stroke, PepsiCo had become the sixth most powerful navy in the world.
Not sure a bunch of questionable quality / condition ships and some oil tankers would really be the "sixth most powerful."
>making PepsiCo temporarily the sixth-largest Navy in the world.
1. USA 425
2. UK 95
3. Japan 81
4. France 65
5. Taiwan 60
6. China 52
7. Indonesia 36
8. India 35
9. Italy 34
10. Germany, Federal 30
Much like England was a naval power and not a land power.
[1]https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/japan-doesn’t-know-wh...
Who controls the currency controls the country. A government forced to barter its warships so a multinational company would continue delivering its soft-drink to its citizens. I wonder if the deliberate sabotage of the Ruble helped usher in collapse.
The AFL-CIO from Detroit got friendly with the Polish Solidarity union. During protests the government would shut down communications.
They told the AFL-CIO what they really could use were FAX machines. AFL people and priests smuggled in the FAX machines in their suitcases and with it an alternative communications network was established. During protests they could quickly send information country wide and they hoped the government wouldn't catch on and it worked.
Without the absolute control over information one country after another fell.
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,159069,...
This put immense pressure on the Soviet Union after people in some of its republics like Georgia and the Ukraine decided that they wanted their freedom too.
The military panicked and staged a coup against Gorbachev. It then dawned on the Russians that they could have their freedom as well.
Source: citizen of Lithuania, the first one to break away.
Sorry for undermining your story btw.
It depends on the lifecycles of the Soviets' assets because it was a bartering arrangement. Plus, gold could be stolen or skimmed, submarines were discrete units of barter that hopefully arrived in more or less one piece.
We're used to total fungible value of everything, but in the Soviet Union bartering with what you had to hand was far more necessary.