Why Coke Cost a Nickel for 70 Years
For whatever reason I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts lately. One of my favorites is Planet Money from NPR. Their latest episode is a really interesting look at why Coca-Cola stayed 5 cents for 70 years. Turns out there are two primary reasons: First, the company got into a crazy deal with the bottlers where it was selling syrup at a fixed price of 90 cents a gallon. Because it was a dumb deal and Coke knew it they realized they needed a way to keep the price from spiraling out of control. Their solution was advertising. Because they couldn’t control the sale price they just went out to the market and told everyone it was 5 cents a bottle, meaning retailers were left with no choice but to sell it for the price consumers expected. The second reason is a little less exciting, but still interesting. Apparently Coca-Cola had an insane amount of vending machines around and they were all 5 cents. After getting out of their contract they could raise the price, but they didn’t want to double it and the machine couldn’t take anything but nickels. They tried (and failed) to lobby the government for a 7.5 cent coin, but eventually just kept the price as it was (with a brief period of giving every eighth consumer an empty bottle to artificially raise the price in a crazy way).