Product Comparison: Coca-Cola Bottles Vs. Pepsi Bottles

Yes, this article is actually about the bottles. This article assumes that readers know what Coke, Pepsi, and related brands of soda pop taste like.

For some people, the competing soda pop brands are interchangeable. Some people can tell Coca-Cola from Pepsi-Cola, or even Diet Coke from Diet Pepsi, by taste alone; some can't. Some can tell Mello Yello from Mountain Dew by taste; some can't. It's all fizzy, chemical-loaded acid that rots teeth and tempers the effect of a high dose of caffeine with lots of sugar (and corn syrup). Those who prefer to take their caffeine in the forms of black coffee, green tea, or chocolate have plenty of reasons to look down on all soda pop, impartially.

During the past year, our local Coca-Cola and Royal Crown bottlers decided to distinguish their products from those of our local Pepsi and 7-Up bottlers, not by using less corn syrup, but by adopting odd-shaped "earth-friendly" bottles. The theory is that engineering wacky curves and grooves into a plastic bottle allows the bottlers to use thinner plastic and reduce their carbon footprint.

And shamelessly pandering to people who don't know how much of anything they want, the Coke bottlers also decided to market their brews in much smaller bottles. After years when six 20-ounce bottles of Coke and six 20-ounce bottles of Pepsi cost about the same, we're now being asked to pay almost as much for six 16.9-ounce bottles of Coke as we'd pay for six 24-ounce bottles of Pepsi. The theory is that the bottlers can get away with this rip-off because there are people out there who think that buying smaller bottles means drinking less soda, thus consuming fewer calories and chemical additives. In other words, health-conscious people can't count.