When Pepsi Had a Navy

https://lflank.wordpress.com/2019/06/25/when-pepsi-had-a-navy/

by davesailer • 7 years ago

223 64 7 years ago

lflank.wordpress.com

duxup• 7 years ago

Interesting story although:

Pepsi a fleet of 17 obsolete Soviet Navy diesel attack submarines along with a decommissioned cruiser, destroyer and frigate, as well as a number of new civilian oil tankers. At a stroke, PepsiCo had become the sixth most powerful navy in the world.

Not sure a bunch of questionable quality / condition ships and some oil tankers would really be the "sixth most powerful."

wil421• 7 years ago

Did they change the quote? Largest makes much more sense.

making PepsiCo temporarily the sixth-largest Navy in the world.

buzer• 7 years ago

"powerful" is still part of the quote. It's from near the end of the text rather than from first paragraph.

jandrese3• 7 years ago

What are the more powerful ones? US, UK, France, Korea?, who else? Japan's SDF was still pretty neutered at the time, China didn't have a navy to speak of, I'm not sure how many other countries would have beaten them at the time. Maybe Egypt?

Conjoiner• 7 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_Navy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Navy#Equipment

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_Spanish_Navy_sh...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_Portuguese_Navy...

rangibaby• 7 years ago

Here's what I got searching country names searching the pennant list from "Janes Fighting Ships 1988-89". It's limited to "major surface ships", and notably doesn't include the USSR due to their policy of regularly changing pennant numbers. I think it's OK for ballpark purposes.

1. USA 425

2. UK 95

3. Japan 81

4. France 65

5. Taiwan 60

6. China 52

7. Indonesia 36

8. India 35

9. Italy 34

10. Germany, Federal 30

https://www.dropbox.com/s/a74zpbb556lv4mn/ships.pdf?dl=0

Iv2• 7 years ago

My guess is that they only compare the fleets in number of attack submarines.

thaumasiotes4• 7 years ago

I mean, that's what really counts in our hearts, right? :D

philwelch• 7 years ago

There aren’t that many powerful navies these days. It’s not like the age of dreadnoughts when countries like Japan and Argentina were getting into naval arms races.

thaumasiotes4• 7 years ago

Japan is a strange example? They're a big island; you'd kind of expect them to focus on their navy.

Much like England was a naval power and not a land power.

nashashmi• 7 years ago

I dont get it. They traded Pepsi for scrap metal? Could not they have traded it for wood, or ore, or gold? Like raw materials?

jandrese3• 7 years ago

Possibly, but the Soviets were looking to offload the old ships anyway and it might have been easier to requisition the mothballed military hardware instead of materials the population needs.

bayareanative• 7 years ago

At the time, no.

It depends on the lifecycles of the Soviets' assets because it was a bartering arrangement. Plus, gold could be stolen or skimmed, submarines were discrete units of barter that hopefully arrived in more or less one piece.

pjc503• 7 years ago

It was a command economy, and the entire export surplus of those other items was probably committed to other trade purposes.

We're used to total fungible value of everything, but in the Soviet Union bartering with what you had to hand was far more necessary.

dillonmckay• 7 years ago

Was blat the method of exchange?

jhbadger• 7 years ago

One of the problems with a military-focused command economy like the Soviet Union's was that consumer goods were in short supply and often not that high quality even when available. But consumer goods are needed to keep people happy. How to get them? The USSR's ruble was worthless on the world market -- only by exchanging goods could they get them.

vmlinuz• 7 years ago

And then, of course, there's the time when Pepsi almost had an air force, albeit briefly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_v._Pepsico,_Inc.

daeken• 7 years ago

I'm still bothered by this case. While I don't think that PepsiCo should've been forced to buy and then sell (for points) a Harrier jet, the fact that there were no consequences for the ad just kind of baffles me. If you look at any ad targeting youth markets from the time period, they had the same nonchalance; sure, they're not pitching a jet, but that just seems like a terrible argument.

chrisseaton5• 7 years ago

the fact that there were no consequences for the ad

It was obviously a joke. No reasonable person would not see that.

pjc503• 7 years ago

I'm not sure what think is wrong with the ad besides making an offer they didn't want to make good on?

The offer bit is a great opportunity to cite Carbolic Smoke Ball https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlill_v_Carbolic_Smoke_Bal...

GuB-42• 7 years ago

It was obviously a joke, that's what the court decided.

I'm kind of upset when some company does something that requires a tiny bit of common sense and faces consequences on the grounds that people with heads full of air get the wrong idea. We are humans, with judgment, not mindless robots, and I believe society should acknowledge that.

Sure, here, the target is high school kids, but what is the risk? It's not like one of them is going to buy a jet fighter. If there is a problem with that ad, it is that it encourages an unhealthy diet by making kids drink Pepsi.

Also note that here, we are talking about a guy who was able to build a scheme that is far from obvious. He even wrote a $700k certified cheque for that. Two possibilities: either Leonard was too insane to handle that kind of money, or, more likely, he tried to exploit an loophole for profit. In some countries, that could be considered fraud.

pts_• 7 years ago

East India Co

omegaworks• 7 years ago

The Soviet ruble was still worthless on the international market

Who controls the currency controls the country. A government forced to barter its warships so a multinational company would continue delivering its soft-drink to its citizens. I wonder if the deliberate sabotage of the Ruble helped usher in collapse.

rmason2• 7 years ago

Actually the Soviet Union was indirectly brought down by the humble FAX machine.

The AFL-CIO from Detroit got friendly with the Polish Solidarity union. During protests the government would shut down communications.

They told the AFL-CIO what they really could use were FAX machines. AFL people and priests smuggled in the FAX machines in their suitcases and with it an alternative communications network was established. During protests they could quickly send information country wide and they hoped the government wouldn't catch on and it worked.

Without the absolute control over information one country after another fell.

http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,159069,...

varjag2• 7 years ago

Not sure about communist Poland, but fax machine had little to do with fall of USSR.

pjc503• 7 years ago

Similarly the Apartheid state of South Africa was brought down in part by modems: https://omalley.nelsonmandela.org/omalley/index.php/site/q/0...

benj1113• 7 years ago

To be fair, they only got fax machines because of the protests. So protests do actually work!

Sorry for undermining your story btw.

mirimir2• 7 years ago

As I recall, during the 80s, Pepsi typically cost more than vodka.

benj1113• 7 years ago

Is that in the soviet union?

mirimir2• 7 years ago

Yeah. Vodka was typically served in a simple ~100 ml glass (maybe 3-4 shots). Pepsi came with a fancy goblet.

tedsuo• 7 years ago

Can’t believe they didn’t mention the cherry (pepperoni?) on top: PepsiCo also got Gorbachev to huck some Pizza Hut for them: https://youtu.be/fgm14D1jHUw

benj1113• 7 years ago

Olive surely?

jedberg• 7 years ago

I remember this! I was 12 when this happened, and I remember talking about it in history class, including all the stuff about Nixon and Krushchev.

creaghpatr• 7 years ago

Interesting case there, but nowadays big conglomerates like Pepsi and Coke surely have thousands of security contractors on retainer? Then again, they can't exactly order an airstrike against Coke...

deftnerd• 7 years ago

This is just a rewritten version of the AtlasObscura story from Jan 2018

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/soviet-union-pepsi-shi...

It's rewritten paragraph-by-paragraph, probably automatically using "rewriting tools" that blog spammers use to plagiarize articles. You can tell because the story follows the same threads from paragraph to paragraph.

novaleaf• 7 years ago

good catch, though probably not rewritten automatically. There's too much "context awareness" going on. If it was auto-written, it was then heavily edited by a native english speaker.

also after skimming the atlas obscura article, I have to say I wish I read that instead. Better prose and a lot more images than the plagiarized version.

coleifer• 7 years ago

Super grimy site, picked up that I'm on at&t and redirected me to some scummy "take our survey and win some shit" site with a fake message dialog.

When Pepsi Had a Navy

Related Stories