Illicit Coke Dealers

Reveries dot com

“Coke is sending lawyers to harass people instead of catering to customer demand,” says Danny Ginsberg of Real Soda in Real Bottles, bashing Coca-Cola’s attempts to stop the flow of the Real Thing from Mexico to the United States, as reported by Chad Terhune in The Wall Street Journal (1/11/06). The story is that in Mexico, “which has the world’s highest per-capita consumption of Coca-Cola,” the locals like their Coke made with real cane sugar and bottled in thick, glass contoured bottles (no American-style plastic bottles or high-fructose corn syrup for them). That’s the way it’s been since Coke arrived in Mexico in 1916 and Mexicans wouldn’t have it any other way — even those Mexicans who have since moved to the U.S. And so, predictably, Mexican Coke is being bootlegged via “independent truckers” and warehouse stores. Just as predictably, that “is costing Coke’s 75 U.S. bottlers millions of dollars a year in sales.” [more]