Originally Posted By: krismoriah72
In 1995 I was a sales rep for Coca-Cola. The only way to make any money was to sell more than the previous year. At our sales meeting we would hear "I dont want to hear that you cant make people buy more..I want to hear that you sold more." About a month before the quarter the sales manager would be panicking...we were never above the previous year..always lacking. So every quarter out behind the large grocery stores would be 1 or 2 Fifty two foot trailers laden with soda. The numbers would count, and they would give the store managers tickets, or whatever they wanted to park the trailers and make the numbers count. So just in my area we would have 100000 cases in limbo just to hit the numbers. This isnt counting the 1000 case displays that were always being built just to keep the numbers afloat.
I remember joking with the budweiser rep back then.. my phone calls would usually be due to sending too much product...his calls were send us more...
Back in 1987, I had a gap year, and worked in a petrol station.
Schweppes had offered my manager 1,000 cases free if he bought 1,000...he found a garage/workshop in the company that was non utilised and filled it up (painted the windows white so kids didn't see the contents).
Coke declined to bargain, they had a price list and that was it.
We had a Coke fridge and a Schweppes fridge, coke and diet coke in the coke, and milk/juice. The Schweppes was Pepsi, all sorts of mineral waters...chockers...we had thousands of cans of their product.
Coke came in one day and stated that we had less than half product in their free fridge, and wanted the milk out...boss re-suggested the offer that he'd given prior...they stated no milk...I spent the afternoon lugging the milk and whatnot out of the coke fridge, the fridge out to the yard, and tidying up the spot for the Schweppes fridge that was showing the next morning.
Free schweppes fridge, and it had a shelf of Coke, a shelf of diet coke, and milk/juice for the rest...and having coke in a pepsi logoed fridge diminished the brand presence badly