Cola Wars Quotes

But eventually, the Elixir of the Soul that had survived wars and the bloody birth of three new countries, was, like most things in the world, trumped by Coca-Cola.

Roger wrote a book called The Other Guy Blinked, declaring victory in the cola wars.

Hey, Zee,” I said. “I take it that you can fix it, but it’ll be miserable, and you’d rather haul it to the dump and start from scratch.” “Piece of junk,” groused Zee. “What’s not rusted to pieces is bent. If you took all the good parts and put them in a pile, you could carry them out in your pocket.” There was a little pause. “Even if you only had a small pocket.” I patted the car. “Don’t you listen to him,” I whispered to it. “You’ll be out of here and back on the road in no time.” Zee propelled himself all the way under the car so his head stuck out by my feet. “Don’t you promise something you can’t deliver,” he snarled. I raised my eyebrows, and said in dulcet tones, “Are you telling me you can’t fix it? I’m sorry. I distinctly remember you saying that there is nothing you can’t fix. I must have been mistaken, and it was someone else wearing your mouth.” He gave a growl that would have done Sam credit, and pushed himself back under again, muttering,“Deine Mutter war ein Cola-Automat!” “Her mama might have been a pop machine,” I said, responding to one of the remarks I understood even at full Zee-speed. “Your mama . . .” sounds the same in a number of languages. “But she was a beauty in her day.” I grinned at Gabriel. “We women have to stick together.

Fui al Museo de Madame Tussauds a ver mi figura de cera. Bueno, en realidad no soy yo, porque no es la de alguien tendida en la cama viendo viejas películas en la tele, bebiendo una Coca-Cola con una mano y apartando la lengua de su perro Gary con la otra.

Like so much in Atlanta, Stone Mountain had become a bland and inoffensive consumable: the Confederacy as hood ornament. Not for the first time, though more deeply than ever before, I felt a twinge of affinity for the neo-Confederates I'd met in my travels. Better to remember Dixie and debate its philosophy than to have its largest shrine hijacked for Coca-Cola ads and MTV songs.

Revival time was a time of war: war on sin, Coca-Cola, picture shows, hunting on Sunday; war on the increasing tendency of young women to paint themselves and smoke in public; war on drinking whiskey—in this connection at least fifty children per summer went to the altar and swore they would not drink, smoke, or curse until they were twenty-one; war on something so nebulous Jean Louise never could figure out what it was, except there was nothing to swear concerning it; and war among the town’s ladies over who could set the best table for the evangelist.

It may not be terribly important that from five thousand miles away you can reach into a university corridor and drop a Coca-Cola can, but it’s the first shot in the war of bringing to us a whole new way of communicating. So that, I think, is the fourth age of sand.

I told her stories. They were only a sentence long, each one of them. That’s all I knew how to find. So I told her broken stories. The little pieces of broken stories I could find. I told her what I could. I told her that the Global Alliance had issued more warnings about the possibility of total war if their demands were not met. I told her that the Emperor Nero, from Rome, had a giant sea built where he could keep sea monsters and have naval battles staged for him. I told her that there had been rioting in malls all over America, and that no one knew why. I told her that the red-suited Santa Claus we know — the regular one? — was popularized by the Coca-Cola Company in the 1930s. I told her that the White House had not confirmed or denied reports that extensive bombing had started in major cities in South America. I told her, “There’s an ancient saying in Japan, that life is like walking from one side of infinite darkness to another, on a bridge of dreams. They say that we’re all crossing the bridge of dreams together. That there’s nothing more than that. Just us, on the bridge of dreams.

Justice and honesty and loyalty are not properties of this world, she thought; and then, by God, she rammed her old enemy, her ancient foe, the Coca-Cola truck, which went right on going without noticing. The impact spun her small car around; her headlights dimmed out, horrible noises of fender against tire shrieked, and then she was off the freeway onto the emergency strip, facing the other direction, water pouring from her radiator, with motorists slowing down to gape. Come back, you motherfucker, she said to herself, but the Coca-Cola truck was long gone, probably undented. Maybe a scratch. Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later, her war, her taking on a symbol and a reality that outweighed her. Now my insurance rates will go up, she realized as she climbed from her car. In this world you pay for tilting with evil in cold, hard cash. A late-model Mustang slowed and the driver, a man, called to her, “You want a ride, miss?” She did not answer. She just kept on going. A small figure on foot facing an infinity of oncoming lights.

Lest you dismiss this as just another conspiracy theory, in November 1998 in an interview with The Observer, former US Ambassador to Chile Edward Korry told a remarkable story. Korry described still classified cables, and information censored in papers, but now available under the FOIA. He had served under Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. He told how US companies from Cola to copper used the CIA as an international debt collection agency and investment security force. The Observer reported that the CIA's Oct. 1970 plot to overthrow Chile's Allende was the result of a plea for action a month earlier by PepsiCo chairman Kendall to the company's former lawyer, President Nixon.

I lay there turning over the pages of my life, thinking of what I had done and left undone, and of the dreams from which I had awakened. How far off seem the bright visions of early boyhood, and how poor and bare the reality looks. I thought of all my expectations, and the small results of my labors; of my wife, who certainly cannot be called either good-natured or good-looking, of my sons who hardly seem to belong to me, with whom I have nothing in common:—of the faithlessness and folly of those around us, of our poor France torn by civil wars and religious persecutions; of my works of art scattered, life itself a handful of ashes, soon to be blown away by the breath of the Destroyer.—I put my face close up against the oak tree, and lay there weeping quietly all among the big roots which cradled me like a father’s arms; and I felt that he listened.

The idea of the camp was to use it as a staging area for soldiers on their way to liberate France. It was much better than putting them in Boston in case the Germans attacked. Allied soldiers from several countries left from Camp Myles Standish to go to England and then on to France. They would only stay for a week or two. One group would go out, and another group would come in. At that camp we were doing everything, all the maintenance. There was a small hospital with nurses and doctors, and we were busy. I worked in the PX. We sold coca-cola, and Narragansett beer was delivered once a month. Cigarettes were five dollars a carton. There was plenty of food. We were glad when they gave us American uniforms; that meant we were something. We had work, and we were doing something good. When Italy got out of the war, and we signed to cooperate, that felt pretty good.

A form of entertainment that has recently become very popular, particularly in the smaller towns, is the Coca-Cola party. Usually the ladies assemble between eleven and twelve in the morning at the home of the hostess. Trays of tall iced glasses filled with Coca-Cola are passed, followed by platters of crackers and small iced cakes. The dining table is decorated like any tea-table with flowers, fruit or mints, except that there are little buckets of ice so that guests may replenish their glasses as the ice melts. Other bottled drinks are usually provided for those who do not like Coca-Cola, but these are few in Georgia. This simple, inexpensive form of entertainment is particularly popular with the young matrons and young girls, who use it to honor a visitor or a bride. Occasionally the parties are held in the afternoon, but usually the afternoon is time for the more elaborate tea.

Dog days in Maycomb meant at least one revival, and one was in progress that week. It was customary for the town’s three churches—Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian—to unite and listen to one visiting minister, but occasionally when the churches could not agree on a preacher or his salary, each congregation held its own revival with an open invitation to all; sometimes, therefore, the populace was assured of three weeks’ spiritual reawakening. Revival time was a time of war: war on sin, Coca-Cola, picture shows, hunting on Sunday; war on the increasing tendency of young women to paint themselves and smoke in public; war on drinking whiskey—in this connection at least fifty children per summer went to the altar and swore they would not drink, smoke, or curse until they were twenty-one; war on something so nebulous Jean Louise never could figure out what it was, except there was nothing to swear concerning it; and war among the town’s ladies over who could set the best table for the evangelist.

Segmentation of usage occasion can be used within the same brand via differentiated packaging formats. Coca-Cola

Thanks to the success of private label strategies (see Chapter 9), five of the top eight FMCG manufacturers in the world are actually retailers; giants such as Unilever and Coca-Cola are no longer even in the top ten, their global sales dwarfed by products under the names of Wal-Mart (now the world’s largest FMCG manufacturer), Carrefour, Tesco, Aldi and Lidl. The

Of the Top Most Valued Brands in 2011, Coca-Cola and Marlboro were 6th and 8th, with their brands valued at $73.8 billion and $67.5 billion. Although retailers have developed private label cola and cigarettes, they can’t position them like these brands, using anything like the Open Happiness campaign and the Marlboro Man, because the private label imagery is intimately tied to the store’s imagery, which by definition will always have to be very broad and bland in comparison.

P&G, Mars, Kellogg’s, Gillette and Coca-Cola all refuse private label contracts, while, on the other hand, Unilever, PepsiCo, Nestlé, Heinz, Playtex, Ralston Purina, Hershey, RJR Nabisco and McCain embrace them.

share. The company’s stock price immediately fell by 26% as the move was widely hailed as a disaster for premium brands. But it was not; it was just the end of a premium brand being overpriced; the problem was that Marlboro had opened up too big of a price premium, opening the door for all kinds of competitors. The event precipitated the end of cigarette price wars because many competitors were unable to compete with a more affordable Marlboro. Within two years, Philip Morris’s stock had fully recovered. The Canadian cola market has demonstrated time and again the consumer’s willingness to switch from Coca-Cola or Pepsi to private label colas if the price differential were greater than $1 for a box of 12 cans. Opening too big a price differential begins a price war by increasing the volume that moves around the market because of price.

Brand Category Year of launch Schweppes Soft drinks 1783 Cadbury Chocolate 1831 Budweiser Beer 1876 Coca-Cola Soft drinks 1886 Heineken Beer 1886 Kodak Photo 1888 Lipton Tea 1890 Wrigley Chewing gum 1892 Colgate Toothpaste 1896 Campbell’s Soup 1898 Marlboro Tobacco 1902 Pepsi Soft drinks 1903 Gillette Shaving products 1908 Camel Tobacco 1913 Danone Yogurt 1919 Kellogg’s Cereal 1922 Duracell Batteries 1930 Nescafé Coffee 1938 Fanta Soft drinks 1940 Tropicana Juices 1952 Friskies Pet food 1956 Pampers Nappies (diapers) 1961 Sprite Soft drinks 1961 Huggies Nappies (diapers) 1978 Red Bull Energy drink 1987

grew up in East Berlin and we could literally cross the street and we were in West Berlin and in a completely different world. The luxury of Coca-Cola, oranges, chocolate, and vegetables; you could buy all of this with your East money, you only had to put up with the exchange rate.

When Harry and Arnold and Billie were born, drugs were freely available throughout the world. You could go to any American pharmacy and buy products made from the same ingredients as heroin and cocaine. The most popular cough mixtures11 in the United States contained opiates, a new soft drink called Coca-Cola was made from the same plant as snortable cocaine, and over in Britain, the classiest department stores sold heroin tins for society women.

A new product, Coca-Cola, was introduced in 1885 by a former Confederate officer, John Pemberton, who had been slashed by a saber in the final fighting of the war, after Appomattox, then wrestled with an addiction to morphine, to dull the pain. A pharmacist, Pemberton experimented with a mysterious formula that derived from the coca leaf and the kola nut, to ease his suffering. The early marketing for the elixir suggested that it could reduce the symptoms that veterans suffered from, including neurasthenia, headaches and impotence.

As the global reach of American industry and finance grew during the postwar era, so did the U.S. national security complex. America's vast system of military and covert power was aimed not just at checking the Soviet threat but at protecting US. corporate interests abroad. Behind the rapid international growth of multinational giants like Chase Manhattan, Coca-Cola, Standard Oil, and GM lay a global network of U.S. military bass, spy stations, and alliances with despotic regimes. The twin exigencies of the Cold War and U.S. empire gave the national security establishment unprecedented free rein to operate. The CIA was empowered not only to engage in the deadly "spy versus spy" antics against the KGB that became the stuff of Cold War legend but to subvert democratic governments that were deemed insufficiently pro-American and to terminate these government's elected leaders.

Star businesses needn’t be anything to do with technology. Only one of my five stars is a technology venture. The longest-running star business is surely the Coca-Cola Company, incorporated in 1888 and a consistent star business until the 1990s. For over a century, despite two world wars, the stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression, Coca-Cola remained a star. The global market for cola increased on trend by more than 10 per cent every year and Coke remained the dominant player in that market. The value of the company increased with remarkable consistency, even bucking the trend and rising from 1929 to 1945.The company used World War Two to its immense advantage. After Pearl Harbor, Coke boss Robert Woodruff pledged to ‘see that every man in uniform gets a bottle of Coca-Cola for five cents, wherever he is and whatever it costs our company’. The US administration exempted Coca-Cola that was sold to the military from all sugar rationing. The US Army gave Coke employees installing plants behind the front lines the pseudo-military status of ‘technical observers’. These ‘Coca-Cola Colonels’ were exempt from the draft but actually wore Army uniforms and carried military rank according to their company salaries. General Eisenhower, a self-confessed Coke addict, cabled urgently from North Africa on 29 June, 1943: ‘On early convoy request shipment three million bottled Coca-Cola (filled) and complete equipment for bottling, washing, capping same quantity twice monthly . . .’2 Coke became familiar throughout Europe during the war and continued its remarkably cosy arrangement with the US military in Germany and Japan during the postwar occupation. From the 1950s, Coke rode the wave of internationalisation. Roberto Goizueta, the CEO from 1980 to 1997, created more wealth for shareholders than any other CEO in history. He became the first CEO who was not a founder to become a billionaire. The business now rates a value of $104 billion.

We have survived everything but freedom! he would fulminate from his seat at the end of the dinner table, banging the table with his fist and causing the silverware jump. War, hatred, violence, opression–all these combined could never do to us what Coca-Cola and Disney and Burger King have. We have lost our way! We have intermarried, we have assimilated! We have bought into the American Dream, but that dream is someone else's, and the dream they dream is a dream of our destruction.

And the historical corrective goes even further, as the energetic and material foundations of modern civilization go back into the five decades before the beginning of World War I and, to a surprisingly high degree, to a single decade, the 1880s. That decade saw the invention and patenting, and in many cases also the successful commercial introduction, of so many processes, converters, and materials indispensable for modern civilization that their aggregate makes the decade’s record unprecedented, and most likely unrepeatable. Bicycles, cash registers, vending machines, punch cards, adding machines, ballpoint pens, revolving doors, and antiperspirants (and Coca Cola and the Wall Street Journal) could be dismissed as the decade’s minor inventions and innovations.

The comedy sketches had all the subtlety of a water-buffalo fight. One sketch involved one of the comics playing an unusual Pachinko machine. The machine was constructed on the lines of a girl wearing only panties and a brassiere. The comic pulled the plunger and let fly. The ball shot to the top of the machine and then fell down into one cup of the girl’s brassiere. This triggered bells and lights and sparks, a panel slid open, and one of the showgirls shoved her unadorned breast through the large hole in the brassiere. The comic pulled the plunger again and the same thing happened again—the ball fell into the other cup and a panel slid back and another showgirl shoved her breast through the other hole. I say another showgirl, because you could tell—they weren’t a set. The comic then pulled the plunger for the third time, the ball fell into her panties, and after the bells, the lights, and the sparks, the crotch panel slid back, and a midget stuck his head out and yelled, “What do we care if we lost the war—we got Coca-Cola!

Where does the word cocktail come from? There are many answers to that question, and none is really satisfactory. One particular favorite story of mine, though, comes from The Booze Reader: A Soggy Saga of a Man in His Cups, by George Bishop: “The word itself stems from the English cock-tail which, in the middle 1800s, referred to a woman of easy virtue who was considered desirable but impure. The word was imported by expatriate Englishmen and applied derogatorily to the newly acquired American habit of bastardizing good British Gin with foreign matter, including ice. The disappearance of the hyphen coincided with the general acceptance of the word and its re-exportation back to England in its present meaning.” Of course, this can’t be true since the word was applied to a drink before the middle 1800s, but it’s entertaining nonetheless, and the definition of “desirable but impure” fits cocktails to a tee. A delightful story, published in 1936 in the Bartender, a British publication, details how English sailors of “many years ago” were served mixed drinks in a Mexican tavern. The drinks were stirred with “the fine, slender and smooth root of a plant which owing to its shape was called Cola de Gallo, which in English means ‘Cock’s tail.’ ” The story goes on to say that the sailors made the name popular in England, and from there the word made its way to America. Another Mexican tale about the etymology of cocktail—again, dated “many years ago”—concerns Xoc-tl (transliterated as Xochitl and Coctel in different accounts), the daughter of a Mexican king, who served drinks to visiting American officers. The Americans honored her by calling the drinks cocktails—the closest they could come to pronouncing her name. And one more south-of-the-border explanation for the word can be found in Made in America, by Bill Bryson, who explains that in the Krio language, spoken in Sierra Leone, a scorpion is called a kaktel. Could it be that the sting in the cocktail is related to the sting in the scorpion’s tail? It’s doubtful at best. One of the most popular tales told about the first drinks known as cocktails concerns a tavernkeeper by the name of Betsy Flanagan, who in 1779 served French soldiers drinks garnished with feathers she had plucked from a neighbor’s roosters. The soldiers toasted her by shouting, “Vive le cocktail!” William Grimes, however, points out in his book Straight Up or On the Rocks: A Cultural History of American Drink that Flanagan was a fictional character who appeared in The Spy, by James Fenimore Cooper. He also notes that the book “relied on oral testimony of Revolutionary War veterans,” so although it’s possible that the tale has some merit, it’s a very unsatisfactory explanation. A fairly plausible narrative on this subject can be found in Famous New Orleans Drinks & How to Mix ’em, by Stanley Clisby Arthur, first published in 1937. Arthur tells the story of Antoine Amedie Peychaud, a French refugee from San Domingo who settled in New Orleans in 1793. Peychaud was an apothecary who opened his own business, where, among other things, he made his own bitters, Peychaud’s, a concoction still available today. He created a stomach remedy by mixing his bitters with brandy in an eggcup—a vessel known to him in his native tongue as a coquetier. Presumably not all Peychaud’s customers spoke French, and it’s quite possible that the word, pronounced coh-KET-yay, could have been corrupted into cocktail. However, according to the Sazerac Company, the present-day producers of Peychaud’s bitters, the apothecary didn’t open until 1838, so there’s yet another explanation that doesn’t work.

[T]he current system in place evaluates us less as citizens and more as customers or consumers. This is applicable even in foreign policies in the sense that the US foreign policy supports or attacks other countries not based on their values and methods of governance but based on whether these nations allow or block America’s corporate interests on their territories. This perhaps explains why the US supports some of the most undemocratic regimes (customers) and destroys and bombs other secular and diverse nations that do not allow mega malls, McDonald’s, Pepsi, Coca Cola, Amazon, you name it, to plunder their lands and populations.