‘Koogle’, wasn’t it?
Coke (and Pepsi for that matter) with cherry coke, vanilla coke, lemon coke, lime coke and perhaps some other oddballs. Not that any one was really that good, but carried the coke name, so get placement.
I don’t disagree, but in the end, I wonder if this wasn’t a net gain for them.
“Coca-Cola Classic” is a phrase that was entered into the American Lexicon because of this and a rather clever marketing campaign.
Holy shit, that’s it!
Yeah, they stopped making it pretty soon (a few years) after launch, and Betty 2 (stepmom) brought cases of the shit home one day.
I took to making PB sandwiches and immediately throwing them away, my only goal to make it through that shit as fast as possible. Took months.
God, it was just crap.
The most extreme one that I know of is that my mom’s canning jars were made by the same company as the Hubble Space Telescope’s optics.
Indeed. My first 11 years were in a tiny farming community in Illinois, where some kids wanted toy versions of the equipment they saw every day. One of my friends had a John Deere pedal tractor.
Remember the alternative-colored margarine from a few years ago? Pink, blue, that kind of thing, allegedly to appeal to children? Nope, that didn’t work. Food pantries and homeless shelters said they wouldn’t take it either, so IIRC the companies ended up using it as animal feed.
Jim Beam has come out with a line of bourbon-flavored barbecue sauces and promotes them to the extent that I have seen them listed on restaurant menus.
I like a good tangy or (to a limited extent) hot barbecue sauce, but don’t really crave “a lick of bourbon” in it.
Obviously you have no future in computer software. 
Speaking of M&Ms… I saw a commercial the other day for an M&M candy bar – a chocolate bar with (chunks of) M&Ms embedded in it. Wasn’t the whole idea behind M&Ms in the first place that you wouldn’t get chocolate all over your hands from eating a chocolate bar? I guess that ship has sailed.
“Goodness gracious, but this lid just will not fit on here!”
Sure, but the toys are more likely to convince the suburban parents to buy John Deere lawn tractors for their lawns. And I’m sure Deere gets a cut of price of the toy anyway in licensing, so they win all around.
Also I think your estimates of equipment costs are out of date; used machines will go for at least those prices these days. The biggest tractors have broken the half-million dollar mark new.
The primary mirror for the Hubble telescope was made by Perkin-Elmer, which was, at the time, owned by Hughes Aircraft, which was in turn owned by General Motors. So one joke was the mirror was made by a company whose main products included mirrors with, “Warning: Objects in mirror are closer than they appear” (referring of course to the side view mirrors in GM vehicles).
Some 40 years ago, Armour & Company (you know, the hot dog & Hormel chili people) was owned by Greyhound.
I do remember one summer when Jello went crazy and came out with cotton candy, root beer, and some flavour full of blue dye that turned stool green.
I don’t recall (thankfully) flavoured peanut butter. But in addition to chocolate milk syrup — there was a time when strawberry and banana milks were popular.
Didn’t Heinz ketchup come in weird colors a few years ago?
Remember green catsup? I mean, it kind of made sense, inasmuch as people have been known to do things with green tomatoes (we has a fantastic spicy pickled green tomato appetizer at a cajun place in Shreveport). Then they decided, why stop at green, let’s go purple!
Now there is only red.
I have never seen banana milk – that sounds like it might be good – but you can get strawberry milk in the usual convenience-store places in Toronto. I do remember seeing blueberry milk briefly. It didn’t last.
The market geniuses will shout right back: “If it ain’t broke, fix it 'til it is!”
I’ve seen strawberry- and banana-flavored milks recently. I’ve ever seen “Chocolate Mint Eggnog” which I heard was very good. My brother and his wife tried those fruit-flavored milks on their younger daughter until they finally realized that she just plain old doesn’t like milk.
Yamaha makes motorcycles AND musical instruments. That’s also quite a stretch.
There was this beverage, years ago, named after the part of a blade that fits inside the handle. They started out with the orange flavor and marketed it using astronauts. Then they added grape and grapefruit flavors. I think the orange flavor is still around, but the others are long gone.
(For some reason, when I was a teenager, I would buy the grape flavor and eat the powder right out of the jar. I did not like the grape beverage, but the powder was addictive)