The Pepsi company isn't that much better. (with regard to strong-arming, don't have much to say about assassinations)
Quite a few bars around here have had to choose to not carry any drinks from either Coca-Cola or Pepsi, just to be able to serve some new, more local, sodas
Well. Ultimately it does. In larger European cities very few fancier restaurants/bars cater Pepsi/Coca Cola. Those brands are gradually being seen more and more as low-end McSodas. The winners are Club Mate/Fritz Cola and a whole bunch of local brands.
I would say that in Prague all the hip places have them, they are also quite popular in Sofia (this is what I had on New Year's Eve as I was on antibiotics), though there are still a few nice bars with Pepsi/Coke. I would presume that this is the case in most of the Eastern EU. The small towns and classic pubs usually got Kofola/Derby or some other cheap local alternative. Btw the manufacturing price of soda is almost negligible.
Wouldn't free markets also have this issue? What stops coca cola to stop catering to establishments who carry their competitors? They've got the mindshare because they have spent a few billion in marketing, so you have to carry what the public want. Now the choice is either coca cola or anything else. How will free market solve this problem?
Your fundamentals are broken. First of all, free markets didn't create this problem in the first place. So you can't just blame them for it nor do they have to be able to fix it to prove their overall validity.
Second, you are buying a bag of goods here.
> They've got the mindshare because they have spent a few billion in marketing
Is this so? I would doubt that. Also, as an aside, are you talking about America? Here in Europe it's different…
> so you have to carry what the public want
No you don't. You have to carry what your market wants. Sales of MS Office on the Mac have schown that "the public" wants it. But what does a Linux distro have to carry? Vim and Emacs.
It depends on your market…
> Now the choice is either coca cola or anything else. How will free market solve this problem?
It's called disruption. Examples of disruptors are Linux netbooks, Afri Cola, maybe Tesla if they succeed, and many others.
We can go more into depth with this discussion if you want.
> First of all, free markets didn't create this problem in the first place. So you can't just blame them for it nor do they have to be able to fix it to prove their overall validity.
Didn't blame anything on anything. I asked a question.
>Is this so? I would doubt that. Also, as an aside, are you talking about America? Here in Europe it's different…
I live in Europe and there is plenty of mindshare captured by these companies. Also soft drinks like these are not in the european culture, you can just take a look at relative market sizes.
> No you don't. You have to carry what your market wants.
Seriously? you are going to make a snide comment about my colloquial use of the term public instead of market? Real mature.
> It's called disruption. Examples of disruptors are Linux netbooks, Afri Cola, maybe Tesla if they succeed, and many others.
All of these things you have listed have existed for decades and barely hold 10% of their respective market. And please don't give the example of linux. Linux cannot be compared with other products which don't get free programming contributions and community support. Linux is nothing like its competitors.
The article cites examples from 30 years ago of a local manager(s), working for a Coca-Cola bottler (not Coca-Cola), directing a hit on union members (the article itself is from almost 20 years ago). That's terrible but Colombia went through a de facto civil war and was (is?) a violent place in the best of times. I do think you may be overstating Coca-Cola's involvement.
How long are people going to milk this Colombia episode to tell people not to drink Coca-Cola projects? I attended a few left-wing protests in the early millennium where activists also brought along banners and t-shirts for their own pet causes, and the "Coca-Cola kills Colombian union activists!" already felt done to death. At this point, it is just as tiresome as using the 40-year-old infant-formula episode to advocate avoiding Nestle products, and it will turn off more people than you'll attract to your cause.
1. That was just an extreme example. The common example is squeezing small businesses to strengthen their monopoly.
2. Was the matter resolved to the satisfaction of the union? Were the culprits or the people responsible acknowledged by the company to stand trial? Did the company compensate the families of those killed?
3. How are employment conditions in Coca-Cola today? In Columbia and elsewhere in the world?
If (2) and (3) had satisfactory answers, I promise I'd drop the matter from here on out and stick to (1).
Dunno. Political killings are kind of a big deal to me. Should I buy the argument that Coca-Cola was a different corporation back then, young and impetuous and we should not hold them responsible, because they are a changed person, err, corporation?
Certainly - because you're an independent and autonomous individual, and that's why your personal and unique choice of "Coca Cola", which was not at all engineered by corporate marketing.
Assuming you're in the US - at least try one of these regional drinks (simple search here - I'm no expert):
I mean, it seems likely to me that every global mega-corporation has probably employed a murderer at some point in time. It's just a numbers game.
If the board has a meeting and decides to murder someone, that's a problem. If some random employee decides to murder someone, it's probably not the company's fault.
1. This sounds like the "but every large world state has committed some form of ethnic cleansing or genocide, so XYZ" type argument. Perhaps that's true; and it's certainly true indirectly, in the sense that wars and killings and executions benefit dominant economic entities. But the conclusion isn't to to just ho-hum excuse it.
2. I suspect most regional soft drink makers don't kill people. So, let's buy their stuff.
3. Of course the board won't take that decision. That's what unofficial fixer positions at contractors are for. Or - the decision is taken independently by a Barney-Stinson-type manager:
