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.
