Ben Gilbert

You're like, yep, this is just what we thought.

And then like you get a couple months in and you're like, wait, this is an ending.

Yeah.

Does everyone hate this?

So I thought this lasted a year or two.

And I asked family members, I asked people who were like, yeah, I think that was like a two or three year period.

There was 79 days between when they released New Coke and when Coca-Cola Classic made its return.

Because there was an opportunity to like renegotiate, hey, actually the rights that you own are to New Coke and then more advantageous deal that we're going to cut.

Yeah.

Interesting.

The crazy thing is they thought when they introduced Coca-Cola Classic that that would be the product for the diehards, for this vocal minority that was really upset about it.

And in practice, what happened is everyone went back to Coca-Cola Classic and nobody stayed on New Coke.

I mean, its market share was 3%.

And I think this completely surprised the executives at Coca-Cola who were like, it's better.

We were going to make small quantities of this Coca-Cola classic just to appease the people who need it.

But it's crazy.

People just went back to the worst tasting one.

Wait, we didn't say the best part of how this ends.

Within a year, Coca-Cola Classic surged past the heights of where Coca-Cola was before the whole debacle started.

So the whole thing worked as an accidental publicity stunt.