(3 of 9)
The millions of parched throats throughout the rest of Africa and Asia make a vision almost too dazzling for Cokemen to bear. A new bottling plant, complete with badminton courts to attract youthful customers, is about to open in Bombay, India. Japan, where all production is still going to U.S.-occupation personnel, is eager for civilian Coke. Most indigenous palates which have sampled the G.I.s' drink have been pleased. Sighed one Tokyo waitress: "It has the sweet-and-bitter taste of first love."
The Amiable Robots. In most places Coke has blended into the local scene as if the brown-green of its bottles and the fire-brigade red of its advertising were some kind of protective coloring. In Brazil, it has become part of the language: buses are known as Coca-Colas (because the fare is nearly the price of a Coke); in British Guiana, schoolchildren get a free Coke on Empire Day; in the Middle East, Coke bottles have become accepted missiles with which to punish unjust umpires at soccer games.
As a matter of first intention, at least, the Coca-Cola Co. is not a missionary in the sense, for example, that the Voice of America is. Except in the sense that it is for free trade everywhere it is not specifically trying to spread the American way of life. Its chief and boundlessly healthy interest is in the liras and the piasters, the tickeys and the centavos which it can induce people to plunk down on store counters or drop into the slots of amiable selling robots. In this laudable endeavor, Coca-Cola has been uncommonly successful. It is currently selling about 50 million Cokes a day all over the world—enough to float a light cruiser. Last year, the Coca-Cola Co. took in nearly $128 million (leaving a net profit of nearly $38 million, a third of it from foreign business).
This did not constitute American exploitation, as the Reds bellow. For at the same time, Coca-Cola's 270-odd foreign bottlers and 3,000-odd foreign retail dealers grossed roughly $150 million. Not out of idealism, but out of good American common sense, Coca-Cola is in the business of creating business wherever it goes.
And a Pinch of CO2. Coca-Cola has avoided the deadly sin of most modern business enterprises: over-organization and overcentralization. The only thing that Coca-Cola sells, outside of the U.S., is its secretly compounded concentrate. This is the same as it was in the day (1886) of Dr. J. S. Pemberton, who invented Coca-Cola—it was then green and supposed to cure headaches. The raw material is shipped to a dozen Coca-Cola-owned plants around the world, and sold to bottlers.
The bottlers add water, sugar and carbon dioxide according to a specific formula, and take care of their own selling—also according to a specific formula. With a few exceptions, Coca-Cola owns no bottling plants or retail stores, leaves the profit from these operations to be made by others. In all countries where it is bottled, Coca-Cola stimulates local industry; virtually all the coolers, bottles, cases, uniforms and advertising material used in foreign countries are made outside the U.S.
The way Coca-Cola manages to keep this loose and sprawling confederation of more or less independent industries producing the same product, with more or less the same advertising and the same sales methods, is one of U.S. industry's miracles of organization.