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PepsiCo Follies
R. Alex Whitlock
I am so angry with PepsiCo that I could scream. As many of you know, I have an addiction to
Livewire. I mourned when it went out of season last year, though I tried to keep it in perspective because it was going to come back this summer.
Except that it didn't.
PepsiCo re-released it, but declined to distribute it to the entire state of Idaho. The only times I've gotten to drink it I've been in Utah, Texas, or Louisiana.
This isn't simply a matter of stores up here electing not to carry it. Last year
everyone carried it and this year nobody does. Someone, somewhere decided that Idaho was not worth selling to.
Sometimes I hate capitalism.
But then comes the kicker. Last year they introduced another variation of Mountain Dew called Pitch Black. It was, to say the least, a flop. I don't think I have ever seen a soft drink flop so badly. By January they were selling
20oz bottles at 5/$1.
But
that they'd decided to try again. They've changed it up at least a little (it's Pitch Black II), but even so, there was almost nothing good about the original Pitch Black. Grape-flavored Mountain Dew just doesn't fly. There is no reason for it to exist and even less reason to dedicate precious shelf-space that could go to my beloved Livewire trying to rehash a failed experiment.
Sometimes I hate
and do not understand capitalism.
Stupid PepsiCo.
Observations
What you are experiencing is not precisely capitalism; it has a lot of features in common with Central Planning. A free market is supposed to punish companies that sell their customers crap; but the mechanisms within PepsiCo (a centrally planned company) which are supposed to anticipate and adapt to those market preferences are apparently defective.
More generally, competitive markets need a boost from these internal anticipatory mechanisms. Capitalism is a lot more efficient when a company makes a strategic retreat from an unpopular line, rather than going bankrupt and being replaced.
I'm sure that Pepsi will pay the price for ignoring market experience (unless they're right, of course, and changing up the formula was all that was necessary), but considering how little both Livewire and Pitch Black figure in to their profit margin, the extent to which it matters to them is much less than the extent to which it matters to me.
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