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Until a better word comes along to denote that process, the dazzled layman can only call it education. Coca-Cola coolly takes hold of Japanese capitalists, Italian intellectuals, German bureaucrats and Bolivian laborers and trains them to do a series of specific jobs in every move and thought the way they are done in America. What is more, the trainees like it.
"Scrap Material, Disposal of." The first step in the educational process is to teach the teachers. The teachers are called "field men" and Coca-Cola employs about 300 of them, half of them Americans. They are scooped up like so many bottles at the front end of a Coke bottling line, and are put through a preliminary two weeks' training in New York, during which they are thoroughly rinsed of any wrong ideas they may have had about Coke. Then they move along the assembly line to various U.S. plants, where they are filled brimful with Coca-Cola lore (sample subjects: old containers, scrap material, disposal of; bad gas, how to detect; bottles foaming on machines, common causes and remedies, etc.).
The trainees spend weeks working in plants at every job involved in bottling, paste up posters, ride with salesmen on trucks delivering and selling Coca-Cola. They spend two weeks at Coca-Cola's central Production School in Atlanta, a minor university. At the end they are given a stiff three-hour exam (sample question: Describe briefly the process followed in cleaning and sterilizing syrup lines and syrup tanks).
Finally, the educational assembly line returns them to New York City, where the graduates get an expense account instead of a diploma and go to take their part in the world—which Cokemen have divided into areas, divisions and territories with the ease of a Georgia politico redistricting Chattahoochee County. The graduates' pupils, ready & waiting for instruction, are the foreign bottlers.
Bums, Crocks & Scuffles. Choosing a bottler from among the applicants (at the moment, Coca-Cola is weighing more than 1,000 applications from all over the world), the Coca-Cola Export Corp. acts approximately like a fairy-tale king choosing a proper husband for his daughter.
A typical, recent case was the plea for a Coca-Cola bottling agreement filed by a Brazilian named Paulo Pereira Ignacio, who wanted to open a Coca-Cola plant in the town of Rio Preto (pop. 23,972). First of all, he had to have money to support his bride in the manner to which she was accustomed (i.e., enough capital to withstand any possible competition and to finance any possible expansion). Pereira Ignacio passed on that count—his father and he had already made millions in textiles and concrete. But the suitor must also measure up in character and honor and local reputation. When Pereira Ignacio passed on this count, too (he had studied at Cornell, entertained progressive views on labor relations), a formal bottler's agreement was finally signed.