How Coke tricked distributors into keeping the price at five cents for decades
Why Coke Cost A Nickel For 70 Years : Planet Money : NPR
So, if you're Coca-Cola, you want to somehow keep the price down at 5 cents so you can sell as much syrup as possible to the bottlers. What do you do?
"One thing you do is blanket the entire nation with Coca-Cola advertising that basically has '5 cents' prominently featured," Young says.
The company couldn't actually put price tags on the bottles of Coke saying "5 cents." But it could paint a giant ad on the side of a building right next to the store that says, "Drink Coca-Cola, 5 Cents."
"Since everybody was brainwashed — people saw these ads all over — it was hard for anyone to increase the price," says Daniel Levy, a professor of Economics at Bar-Ilan University in Israel and at Emory University in Atlanta.
