No, Diet Coke Is Not Alright
False scarcity, the inertia of capitalism, and my artificially sweetened soda of choice
“We don’t have Coke Zero; is Diet Coke alright?”
Every time I get asked that question, I feel like screaming. Absolutely not, Diet Coke is not alright. It tastes like someone melted plastic into real Coke and then filtered it through a lawn chair on a hot day. Usually, I will just say “Gimme a regular Coke,” because sacrificing the reason why I drink zero sugar soda is a hard but necessary choice. Monday, I relented because I really do feel like I should be trying to shed a few pounds. I can’t keep having to buy new clothes when the old ones don’t fit, but I already wrote about all that a few years back.
Wendy’s is generally the baseline of where I’ll go to for a burger joint. They have the third-best chicken sandwich in fast food behind Popeye’s and Raising Cane’s. Their regular spicy chicken sandwich is somehow hotter than the ghost pepper one they have out right now on special. As with any fast-food place, the service is going to be scattershot. I can live with that because I know that it’s a thankless job done by overworked and underpaid labor. Slow service, wrong orders, that stuff doesn’t bother me because I get it. Wage skullduggery sucks. Solidarity forever.
The stuff that gets me is when you can’t reliably figure out what’s on the drink menu from store to store. Some Wendy’s locations have Coke Zero Sugar. Others do not. That’s not a fault of the people who work at the franchise; it’s a fault of planning. Fans of capitalism will tell you that it’s just not efficient to have a fountain dedicated to Coke Zero Sugar if “no one” orders it, but that’s the kind of talk for something that’s just launched. Coke Zero Sugar is 18 years on the market. If it were a human being, it would be allowed to vote. There’s market penetration. Both Coke and Pepsi have a wide array of zero sodas in different flavors and products. People drink it enough for cans to be at the supermarket (and fly off the shelves too!). Why can’t it be uniform at every fast-food place?
“Is Diet Coke alright?”
If you grew up drinking full sugar sodas like I did, drinking Diet Coke is a culture shock with how artificial it tastes. Some people do develop a taste for it. Others drink it because it is somehow far more effervescent than even regular Coke. I’m not here to judge those who do imbibe it, except for Donald Trump, even if it did produce one of his funniest tweets.
I’m just telling you that if I had the choice between drinking liquid plastic with the faint hit of cola flavor or drinking water as a means of being healthy, I would suck it up and go with pure hydration, no matter the quality of the tap water. And if you don’t think tap water tastes different from locale to locale, live in the Philly area for long enough to go from in the city, where the water borders on delicious, to the PA suburbs, where it has a faint and unpleasant chemical aftertaste, to the Jersey shore, where you might as well be drinking out of a chlorinated swimming pool. Of course, I’d want to drink something that tastes as good as soda without the calories and fast track to type II diabetes, but that wasn’t an option until 2005, when Coke Zero dropped for the first time.
It's since gone through two reformulations, but I haven’t really noticed that much of a dramatic change either time. Every bottle, can, or glass of Coke Zero or Coke Zero Sugar I’ve had in my life has tasted almost as good as the real thing. Obviously, you’re not getting the authentic Coke (or Pepsi, or Mountain Dew) flavor without actual sugar, but all these zero formulations come close enough for me to drink it habitually. Being that it’s been around for nearly two decades, I’m not the only person who feels this way. How many other sodas bomb so badly that they go by the wayside before their first year on the market? New Coke. Dr. Pepper Ten. Pepsi One.
So why aren’t zero sugar sodas everywhere?
“Is Diet Coke alright?”
Obviously, there’s always been a problem with diet sodas because companies have been trying to corral health-conscious soft-drinkers for decades. You’d think after having something with staying power that you’d want to make it available everywhere you distribute. But fast food restaurants are slow on the uptake, which could be a reason why they’re all slowly spiraling. I say “a” reason because there are plenty of other reasons not to go through the drive-thru.
I know what you’re thinking. Diet/zero soda isn’t really healthy inasmuch as the caloric danger is replaced by chemicals that I’m not sure we know the long term impact of. And fast food is, by and large, has a more unhealthful reputation even if most of the time, the only real way to eat healthy is to cook the food yourself. I think maybe you get the idea that this isn’t a newsletter post about soda by now.
Artificial scarcity is the backbone upon which capitalism stands upright. Defenders love saying that capitalism breeds innovation, but that innovation is often foisted upon the public through nefarious means. It also tends to be old stuff with a fresh coat of paint. The stuff that is actually worth buying ends up being a disappointment of microtransactions and scarcity. Want a PS5? Cool, they only made 100 of them this batch, gotta wait for the next lot. Ooh, there’s something on a streaming network you want to watch? It had better be popular or else the company behind it will dump it for a tax break. Video games have file sizes bigger than the hard drives of the consoles they’re made for, and companies still have the gall to charge for DLC later on.
The soda thing is just a more eldritch example of this given how old soda machine infrastructure is, but hey, why put money into improving a store when you have to line the CEO’s pocket with bonuses and blame the rising cost of a meal on living wages or the mystical boogeyman inflation? It’s not a big deal in the long run, but the overarching problem is a huge deal. It’s a symptom of what the country and world is becoming where the focus isn’t on providing quality goods and expert service for a fair price.
Diet Coke isn’t alright. It never was alright. It’s gross. But I guess that’s just the way things are going. Fewer choices masquerading as a plethora, all while you have to pay more and more. I don’t know, man. Maybe I should just pack a lunch every day. At least I’ll know I can have the drink of my choice.