Beware, The Dr Pepper 20-Pack
If you haven’t noticed lately soft drinks have all grabbed a price hike. At least at our local Ralph’s every 12 pack of soda is $4.50 each (with the “sale” price of 2 for $9). My wife and I have taken notice of these prices and are waiting for them to come down to the regular and reasonable price of $3/12 pack. We regularly stockpile if the price gets below $2.50/12 pack.
We just returned from a weekend trip and my wife said I should stop by the grocery store today because the weekend sale of Coke was about to expire. The sale price was $5 for a 24 pack (which if you’re doing the math is $2.50/12 pack). Stock pile alert.
When I arrived at the store, all of the Coke products were sold out. But Dr Pepper and Diet Dr Pepper were still there. A two item limit kept me from filling my shopping cart, but I took advantage nonetheless.
When I got home later, I noticed something strange. I hadn’t bought a 24 pack of Dr Pepper. Instead I had bought an insidious 20 Pack. What?!?!? Where did the 20 pack come from and how did I get duped by it? As you can tell from the picture above, Diet Dr Pepper was still in the 24 pack. My guess is that they are clearing the shelves of 24 packs so they can put up these illegitimate 20 packs to screw with our math.
My first reaction to my wife was “They pulled an ice cream.”
I don’t like it, thus I am blogging about it. Hopefully other people can be saved from this scam. Pay attention, Coca-Cola bottling company; Dr. Shasta isn’t THAT bad. I already tried it once in the last month. I’m not afraid to switch back. Reducing volume and charging the same price might work great for Ben & Jerry’s but I’m not going for it with you. I was bothered by your high prices, and now I feel ripped off. Cut it out, you’re an unnecessary expense and a recession is on.
As you can tell, my cat is perplexed by the situation as well.
Update 2/15/09
As you can tell, the quarterly sale finally happened about a week or two ago. We found 12-packs for $2 each. Notice something in the photo of our stock pile? No Dr. Pepper!
Update 3/5/09
This post is the #1 Google hit for the term “Dr Pepper 20 pack”! Not bad for 6 weeks on a brand new and unknown blog.
emmy
Yeah, I just got scammed by the same thing. I paid $6/20-pack at a store where I normally don’t buy pop ’cause they don’t run sales and generally have higher prices. I thought they had temporarily lost their minds. Shoulda known it was a scam. When none of the usual places have 12-packs of Diet Dr. Pepper on sale, I usually get the 24-pack and unload it into two empty 12-pack cartons. I did a real HUH? when I got to the bottom of the “24-pack” and the second 12-pack wasn’t full. Took me a couple seconds to process it! I understood when the prices of pop jumped along with the price of oil (in the form of corn), but now that oil and corn are back down, I don’t understand why the prices keep going up. Maybe this is the nudge I need to stop drinking this crap!
March 1st, 2009 at 10:07 pmLan
I noticed that too. Every WalMart, Williams, CVS, and Walgreens here in Oklahoma has started carrying 20 packs. None of the workers there seemed to know why they stopped carrying the standard 24 packs and the 20 packs are just as expensive as the 24 packs were (Walmart @ 5.98 per 24 and 20 pack).
September 28th, 2009 at 3:01 amTad DeWree
Think the 20 pack Soft drink case is deceptive, better take a look at the 1lb (16oz) bag of coffee beans, is magically
been reduced to 12oz, but they still charge $9.99. (a 25% increase.) I wrote a couple blog posts about this:
Pounded: Gourmet coffee’s dirty secret. http://mind4marketing.com/blog1/?p=692
Great post.
August 30th, 2010 at 7:16 pm