Apparently the story goes that this 20-25 year old bottle was found in 2016(?), which went viral online, and Nintendo wound up sending the guy an unopened SNES anyway. (Plus a bunch of other stuff)
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Just the whole contests being offline and straightforward in general.
Nowadays, it's "enter the code on our website, view the ads, give us your name and email so we can send you more ads and sell your info to other advertisers. Also, you're not a winner. Buy more [product] and try again!'
I miss the days when your bottle cap said "You won a free 20oz bottle" and you could just hand that to the cashier as if it were cash.
I worked in a grocery store during these promotions. Only the winning bottles had anything printed under the cap, so you could hold an unopened bottle up to the light to see. If you saw text, it was a winner, and I would stash those in the beer cooler for break time.
I know you could peek under the cap that way, but I also recall caps that said "Sorry, try again" or something like that. Maybe those "not a winner" messages were added as a response?
Exactly right. It got harder, but not impossible to detect winners once they made that change.
In the summer of 1980 RC Cola was giving cash prizes from the bottle caps of glass bottles. None of it was serious money. I remember five, ten, and twenty five cent winners with maybe a dollar thrown in there every once in a while.
It was pretty exciting for me to find a quarter under my bottle cap. That would buy a candy bar at the time, so sugar rush bonus!
I love the idea of that, but it does not sound very sanitary at all lol.
Edit: Actual quarter or something you could redeem for a quarter?
Oh no. The amount was printed on the underside of the bottle cap. You had to pull out that little plastic gasket to see it. Then you'd exchange the bottle cap for whatever coin from the cashier.
That makes much more sense, lol. But also, I grew up in the 80s, so the crazy way also checks out.
It would check out even more if Coke had changed their receipe (let me finish) to reintroduce cocaine back into the formula.
The way a few people I know are addicted to Coke, and only Coke, I'm not entirely sure that didn't happen.
Coke addict here. Also tried Coke. Definitely coke in the coke.
I did always wonder the logistics behind that. Did those businesses get reimbursed from the contest runners? I like the idea of them trading in their piles of caps for cash
Yes, you can find dollar off coupons in stores and the fine print says the merchant will be reimbursed
When I worked at a chain grocery store, a manager would routinely close a register to balance the till, but also remove the coupons which were supposed to be compared to the computer system for accuracy, but mostly just got shoved into an envelope to send in to a regional place to sort by manufacturer and claim the $$$.
They did.
When the distributor came to re-stock them, they'd settle up and either get reimbursed or would have a credit applied to their current/next shipment.
They gave it to the soda distributor who would stock the soda. Guy in the Pepsi or Coca Cola truck would take it.
Or, ya know, a bank transfer. Or check. I'm not imagining RC cola coming in with a bag full of cash.
That seems like a "only at participating stores" sort of thing, wbere the local owner eats the loss in exchange for more people in the store.
It was actually more profitable for the business to accept the bottle cap because the vendors accepted the bottle caps back and gave them an additional eight cents.
I'm sure that doesn't seem like a lot but I mean hey you get an extra couple of bucks you make some kids happy everyone wins. Most businesses typically run on net 30 payments anyway so it's not like it's a huge ordeal for them to hold on to a couple of bottle caps for a week.
Stop. PLEASE!
........I can only get SO erect!
One time I went on a weird streak of one free soda winning me another free soda. It kinda freaked me out, hah.
Loved when that happened. I think my best streak was 3. It was the 10-year old version of winning the lottery.
I had a really long steak of that with scratchers lottery tickets. I bought five $1 scratchers, won a couple dollars, so bought scratchers with them, and just kept doing that. At some point, I cashed in my original $5 because I'd won more than that on a round, but it was a freakishly long streak and I was sad when it ended.