Comment by kotaKat
2 days ago
Oh! I've witnessed this quietly every time I buy soda!
I'm a habitual enough soda drinker that I'm a six-pack-a-day diet soda drinker (don't judge me, at least it's not Red Bull). I notice that there's vendor collusion at Walmart for months at a time where the Pepsi six-packs will typically go on sale for a few months at a sub-$4 to $5 price (currently it's $4.98) while Coke packs will be $5-6 off sale.
Cycle three to four months and Coke will enter the $4 position and Pepsi goes back up to a full retail price for the next quarter.
I've always seen the 'cycle' of the two competitors constantly hitting a 'sale' price across various retailers.
I used to drink a lot of seltzer purchased in those 1 liter bottles. Then I bought a countertop soda maker. I can make the same amount of soda that I was paying $1.50 for at the store for $0.20 now. (I refill my own CO2 off a 10 lb tank) I can't imagine paying more than $0.50 for a liter of soda anymore. They have got to be making an obscene profit on those drinks.
Even weirder, the drinks that I flavor myself taste way better than the ones in the store. I suspect they have been titrating their flavoring down over time. Root Beer I make myself using drink powder tastes way better than the ones from the store. Same for grape and orange sodas.
Seems to be a pattern among all products I’ve ever encountered. I’m a heavy sales shopper. My local grocer (Ingles) will do a promo for Sargento cheese or Chobani yoghurt for instance, normal price of 5$ let’s say, then drop it to $2 for a week, then to $4 the next week, then back to full price. This rinses and repeats every 2 or 3 months for most sales products.
Sadly for this RedBull drinker, they never go on sale, at all, ever, anywhere.