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Comment by steviedotboston | Hacker News Reader

the price of name brand soda is outrageous. I remember when it was around a dollar a bottle not long ago, now it's basically 3 dollars a bottle. I can't think of a good explanation for this. It's water and subsidized corn syrup.

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They're pricing at the point of pain, not maximizing efficiency. There are few enough companies (what, like, 3?) that own the majority of the brands so they don't even need to collude to figure out that they can all hover around "as high as we can get away with" together.

I've been nursing a minor Coke Zero addiction for years but usually get the store brand which is close enough at half the cost. For whatever reason Coke Zero itself dropped in price by about 30% recently but that's apparently not nationwide.

It really kind of blows my mind how much of that people drink. I'll get a 2 liter bottle that will last days and then I read about people going through entire cases of Mountain Dew Insane Flavor Combo Super Bacinator Blast in a day and it's like my god that's like 4000 kcals of corn syrup.

It's sad to see, when I go to my local Walmart, how much sugar water people buy, cases and cases. It must be a significant source of liquid for them.

More importantly it is a significant source of calories. My brother quit soda years ago when he realized he was getting 1/3 of his daily calories from sugar - a little sugar is okay but you can't meet your daily nutrient needs when that much is from sugar. If it is just liquid soda is just as others (and probably better than alcohol), but there are other considerations.

> how much sugar water people buy, cases and cases

One confounding factor here is that oftentimes the price is only reasonable in bulk. I don't know about walmart, but around me the best deal typically is "buy 2 get 3 free". I rarely buy/drink soda, but on the occasions I buy at all I'll be getting many cases at a time.

Late stage capitalism

I find that the Walmart brand diet sodas are pretty good and are only $1 for a 2 liter.

It's totally "because they can". Even if you take marketing budgets into account I can't imagine it costs that much more to make a 2l of Diet Coke vs the store brands which still sell for $1 where I live

That stuff is so bad for you though that raising the price probably decreases the country's total healthcare costs by quite a bit.

The thing with inflation is that a product's individual components may cost the same or less over time, but the cost of everything else...like housing...doubles every couple of years. So you need to increase prices to support higher salaries, increasing minimum wage, etc. It's rides the line of becoming run away inflation since everyone needs to raise prices to support COL, then everything gets more expensive, then they need to raise prices again to support everything else getting more expensive. It's a loop that will never be closed

I buy soda syrup to make soda, but even that's gotten expensive. Funny thing is that I do it to reduce how much I was putting in recycling, but even with the extra state tax for bottles/cans, it actually costs me slightly more to make it myself.

I've had great results making my own mineral water clones though, so maybe I'll try making LabCoatz's coca cola clone syrup and see how it works with sucrolose or allulose.

If you're buying individual bottles, you're paying for the refrigerator. Otherwise you buy boxes and it's still very cheap. Spindrift is $6.49 for an eight-pack and LaCroix is cheaper. I haven't bought Coke in a long time, sorry.

Pepsi, coke ,Dr p, A&W root beer are now all .50c per can or more, in bulk cases from Sam's. Root beer is like 75c/can.

5 years ago I think they were about 30c.

Beer has done the same thing. A few years ago I could get any of a number of beers at Costco for $1 per can/bottle in a 24 pack. Now the cheapest name brand offerings are $1.33 per can and even the Kirkland brand is over $1. If I buy it at a standard grocery store, those same beers are over $2 each.

It was intentional price gouging, but prices have become to come down after shareholders pressured CEOs to lower the prices in response to tepid sales numbers.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/pepsico-cut-prices-eliminate-...

(The link is for PepsiCo but we all know that they all raised their prices together and will lower their prices together.)

>I can't think of a good explanation for this.

Supply and demand.

I prefer "greed". It's the much a simpler explanation that works just as well. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that the demand for soda has stayed the same or even actually declined while the supply of corn and water hasn't bottomed out or gotten proportionately more expensive for soda companies.

You just restated the supply and demand curve with different terms.

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