Look, this is false advertising, which is prohibited under the Lanham Act, and which provides individuals a federal cause of action. I’m not sure what your damages are going to be here though. It is also straight trademark infringement, which gives Coca-Cola a federal cause of action as well.
Everyone has been increasingly on edge around here and some folks have indeed gotten to the point of seeing bad faith / excessively doctrinaire arguing everywhere. Ironic that I thought you were doing that and I ended up doing it myself.
This is an important point. The guy running the Bob’s Burgers (or whatever) is probably undercutting Carl’s Jr. by a dime (and he probably used to be able to do that while ordering Coca-Cola products. Otherwise how did he score Coca-Cola branded equipment in the first place?). And he has probably been able to do that by buying paper cups that aren’t labeled with the Coke logo.
It could be worse, the Bubble Bouncers can come for anyone in the league - carbonated or nitro, alcoholic or not, if it bubbles/sparkles/effervescences they will come down on you with both boots.
I know the OP isn’t treating this super seriously, but I would like, from my own curiosity, to know how much the place in question charges for their soda. I mean, even the locally owned places now generally charge $2+ for drinks with refills, regardless of the low cost, and I understand it, it’s one of the few places to make real profit when food is always far closer to break even between time to prepare, the materials, etc.
If this place was “only” charging $1 for drinks, well, I would be a lot less offended at the branding. If they’re charging the usual for name-brands (which seems to be the case), then, yeah, I’d be more irritated.
My wife can’t drink Diet Pepsi. There is something in it that gives her headaches. Now, if the generic diet cola has the same ingredient as Diet Pepsi that gives my wife headaches, then I have damages.
I put in the order through Wingstop’s website. I was not, at that time, a customer of any of those food delivery services.
Wingstop may have chosen to handle my order by delegating it to one of those services, but if so, and if that service was at fault (and in this case they weren’t, because the delivered bag had my name on it) then that’s for Wingstop to work out with them; my transaction was with Wingstop, I had no customer relationship with any delivery service.
There’s a lot of ‘probablys’ in your post. My post was addressing Spoons mistaken understanding that the OP (or others in this thread) were choosing to go to that burger joint for the drinks. The actual important point, to me anyway, is if they advertise actual Coke and serve me knock-off cola, that’s wrong. There will be a taste difference and they are ‘probably’ profiting off of the deception.
I would imagine that if the signage said they were serving Coca Cola, and they were serving off-brand cola, they could argue that the inferior off-brand cola damaged their brand image and reputation.
But as for the consumer? You might have standing, but damages aren’t present, so while you could sue, you wouldn’t probably get very far.
Oh it absolutely is a Chicago thing. Growing up, an order of pizza from the local pizzeria would almost always come with one free liter of RC. I very much associate RC with at least my neighborhood and the surrounding neighborhoods here in the South/Southwest Side of Chicago. Local wedding halls often would also have RC, or sometimes even Filbert’s (a still-extant Chicago soda brand.)