What's Missing and Not Missing
You go to the grocery store to get some soda. Walk down the aisle. Let's see. Coke, Diet Coke, Caffeine-Free Diet Coke, Pepsi, Diet Pepsi, Pepsi One, 7-Up, Diet 7-Up, Sprite, Diet Sprite, and so forth, following the usual litany of flavored waters. But something is missing. Several things, actually. Up and down the aisle. Where's the Diet 7-Up or Diet Sprite? Or Diet Dr. Pepper, even. Or half a dozen others? Not there. Huh? Someone down here didn't pass the graduate course in market segmentation?
Now, I am seriously addicted to Diet Snapple iced teas as my morning eye openers (when I can't make my own iced tea, such as on business trips or this temporary housing). Have to search like four stores before I can find a single bottle of Diet Snapple Iced Tea. They usually have ten or twelve flavors of Snapple concoctions. With luck one or two of them will be of the diet vintage.
Differences in what the market wants, I guess. Sugar is king.
By the way, product lines appear to be slightly different between major chains, but still most of them just don't carry the full line of full-strength and unleaded soft drinks. Weird. For instance, Walgreens has almost no diet iced tea. I've tried half a dozen of them. Same line. I have to go to one chain, which shall remain nameless lest others snap up my supply, to get any Peach-flavored Snapple Diet Iced Tea. And the Raspberry flavor apparently contains the secret ingredient unobtanium.
2000/01/12
