> 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.
The headline delivered exactly the story it promised. I was surprised I had never heard about it before.
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.
Anyways, thanks for reading everyone.
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.
So my example was a "$199,999,800 typo"? Can't we just round up?
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.
> 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.
sometimes things are legitimately outrageous and worthy of an emotionally charged headline.
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.
Except that the attracted readers wouldn't lierally click on anything until news moved to the web, that's been the point of headlines forever.
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?
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?