Chalk me down as another person who loves Diet Mountain Dew and can never freaking find the stuff. I simply prefer the taste to regular Mountain Dew, which is too sugary for me. I got to Costco and they have the large cases of diet Pepsi and diet Dr. Pepper but heaven forbid they stock and diet Dew :mad:
This takes me back to something you can’t taste anymore anywhere, I’d bet - Mountain Dew in a cold glass bottle. It was half my breakfast most mornings in high school, along with a package of honey-roasted peanuts.
Almost as good taste as Vernor’s, but with more kick.
I don’t have a lot of trouble finding regular Diet Mountain Dew here in the Seattle area, but what I can’t find any more is the Code Red Diet Mountain Dew (CRDMW). I love the stuff, but you can’t find it any more in Seattle. Regular (i.e., non-Diet) Code Red Mountain Dew is available, but that’s not what I want.
Without CRDMW I’ve been forced back to drinking regular Diet Mountain Dew for my morning caffeine buzz. At least the cafeteria here at work still stocks it in the 20oz bottles (and lots of those, thank goodness).
At first I just assumed that CRDMW had been completely discontinued, but then one day we popped into a grocery store in adjacent Snohomish county, and looky there! 12-packs of CRDMW sitting happily on the shelves next to the other Mountain Dews. Naturally I/we grabbed like crazy, and when we left there were 5 12-packs stashed in our trunk.
Curious about this, we got on the internet and checked the online shopping site of a different grocery store chain in the area. If we put in our King county zip code (Seattle’s county), CRDMW wasn’t available. However, if we put in a Snohomish county zip code, then suddenly CRDMW was available online.
I can only assume that there are different distributors for the two counties, and the Snohomish one recognizes a demand, and the King county one doesn’t.
Since then I’ve been making regular runs back to that store, and so far they’ve had CRDMW every single time. I don’t know why Snohomish county stores can get the stuff, while King county stores can’t, but it’s annoying as hell.
Strangely enough, I never cared for MD in a glass bottle. Or rather, I prefer it from a can or plastic bottle. Dunno why. I didn’t really start drinking MD until my early 20s (my family didn’t drink much soda), which was around 1986-87. The only glass bottles available were those short, fat, 16oz bottles popular at that time, so I never had a chance to drink MD from the old-style tall bottles. Maybe that makes a difference. I know that cocktail and wine glasses are shaped the way they are in order to direct the drink to certain areas of your tongue (because different types of taste buds are grouped in different areas) so that you taste the drink the “right” way. I’ll bet the bottle shapes directed the flow differently.
The wacky distribution affects things other than sodas. Stop and Shop have a house brand line of cookies which are actually good – As in, they’re nice and chewy and don’t have that nasty off-taste you get when they use oils in place of shortening/butter/margerine. (The cookies look like Archway rips offs as far as packaging goes.)
Anyway, they come in an assorted flavors, and the display shelf makes it clear they get equal numbers of each flavor. Guess what? One slot is empty 5 out of 6 times I shop. The same slot each time, of course: Oatmeal Raisin. They have zillions of chocolate chips, zillions of plain oatmeal, but the wonderful Oatmeal Raisin ones vanish instantly. 
I’ve even spoken to the store manager about it. Like, why don’t you order more Oatmeal Raisins and cut back on the plain Oatmeals? And he says he’s tried, but they always deliver them in even sets. If you want two cartons of one, you have to take two cartons of each.
Who in the world thinks this is sensible? Does Toyota insist on making the same number of puke-green Corollas as beige ones? What’s the point of all that sales data you collect at the registers if not to tweak what you stock??
Maybe each variety is baked in a different factory, and the baker’s union agreement forces them to give workers in each factory an equal amount of work 
At least the machine wasn’t out of crab juice, right?
Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought all Coke products were at one time banned in Arab countries because of their ties with Israel…and Pepsi gladly filled in the marketing void by staying out of the fray.
I have this problem with the vending machine guys at work, too. For some reason, they only put 8 (!!) Mountain Dews in the machine at a time. I know this because I’ve watched them do it, and I’ve asked about it. Their answer? “The standing order is for 8 Mountain Dews in this machine.” Never mind that, in a busy week, I could drink all 8 of those Mountain Dews myself. On Monday. Before lunch. I tell them this every time I see them. “You should put more Mountain Dew in there, a lot of us like it.” “Standing order, ma’am.” “Who do I need to contact to change the order?” “You can’t change the order, it’s a standing order.” Sigh. And since they only fill the machines every two weeks, it’s a dogfight for those eight glorious, precious bottles.
Don’t even get me started on trying to find Live Wire, which is my absolute favorite in the Mountain Dew family of products.
I was told that in the Pittsburgh area there will be no more Pepsi One. After being unable to find it in stores, and after being told by store after store that they could no longer get it from distributors, I called Pepsi.
They’re not going to sell any more Pepsi One here because Splenda is too expensive and they don’t want to. It doesn’t matter that it was popular. Dadsix, who has been drinking Pepsi for over fifty years is switching to Diet Coke. He also called them to register his complaint regarding the disappearance of Pepsi One.
They asked him why he won’t just switch to Diet Pepsi. He and I agree that Diet Pepsi’s after taste is like shit run over twice. He told them as much.
Hubby’s soft drink of choice is Diet Vanilla Pepsi. When the Pepsi products go on sale around here, I try to hit the stores the very first day (or at latest, second day) of the sale. Because they sell out of Diet Vanilla Pepsi within 48 hours. Like everyone else, we’ve asked the store manager why they don’t just order more of the DVP, and the managers all say the same thing: that’s the way it works. They bring however much of each kind that they think they should bring. Reality obviously doesn’t enter into it.