Pamela Jean Owens off-line

I make no claim to understand economics. None whatsoever. Never took a course in it, have no “investments” other than the Pension Fund and the Credit Union accounts, and have no idea what “retirement” would even look like.

But I’ve been doing some thinking, since watching the Super Bowl ads on Sunday and thinking about Cokes. Cokes Then, like the famous Mean Joe Greene ad, and cokes Now, Coke Zero, as in the new remake of the same ad with the current nice guy of pro-football, (somebody please send me his name before I have to google him).

When I was a kid, a coke cost a nickel. It didn’t matter if you got a fountain coke at the soda fountain at the drug store, or the lunch counter at Woolsworths, which was also known as the “dime store” or even the “five and dime,” or from a machine in some public place. As far as I can remember, a coke probably cost a nickel at the picture shows as well, and pop-corn a dime, but I can’t swear to that.

I’m not just talking about the 1950s here. I’m talking about the 1960s as well, when I went off the college. Every morning I went downstairs in my dorm and bought a coke from the machine and took it with me to breakfast, where I poured it over a cup of ice, just like I’d been doing since I was a teenager. Back then in the C-Shop (the central campus snack shop and quick lunch place), an ice cream cone also cost a nickel, or a dime for a double dip. As far as I knew, that was what ice cream always had cost and always would, a nickel a dip.

Then the president put a boycott on Cuba and the price of sugar soared sky high. Coke machines doubled their prices to a dime, and I toyed with boycotting the coke machine in the basement of the dorm, buying mine in the grocery and bringing them back, but with no car, there was really no percentage in trying to do that. Friends who could went to Cuba on Venceremos Brigades, and die-hard Coke addicts like me bit the bullet. After all, Carolyn Candler, one of the heiresses to the coca cola fortune, was in my class at Vanderbilt and on Lupton 1300 with me freshman year, and they were doing the best they could just to scrape by. Sort of like the Wall St. barons are doing today. Who could begrudge them an extra nickel per coke? Of course that was double the old price, which seemed to pay for a bit more than higher sugar prices, but, hey, the machines couldn’t very well charge 6 cents could they?

Actually, there were some places, like church offices, where the machine was owned by the place, not by the vending machine distribution company, and regular people put the drinks in and took the money out. They couldn’t change the price so easily — who’d have ever thought they’d need to do that? — so they came up with various solutions. Most popular was putting a box on top of the machine and trusting everyone who got a drink to put in an extra penny! I’m not kidding. I well remember the machine in the Christian Church in the Southwest Regional Office in Ft. Worth still had that system when I was there years later, around 1978 or so.

I remember at Vandy we soon discovered that at the BSU the campus minister had decided not to raise the price, so more and more of us started ducking through there on the way across campus to buy a coke. Trust those old mainline Southern Baptists to get us in their door one way or another (that was in the days when Baptists were BAPTIST, not fundamentalists…. but that is another story). Anyway, God bless old Pitts Hughes (that was a woman), for saving us anyway she could. I haven’t forgotten her welcome offer of salvation on the pass-through to one and all, that’s for sure. (That last sentence was for those of you who didn’t catch the bad pun in the previous sentence, sorry.)

Back to the price of coke and the economy: somewhere by the time I got to grad school at Chicago, coke had climbed to a quarter, then gradually to fifty cents, depending on who owned the machine and where it was. We addicts had an internal compass to the cheaper machines again, and once again, leave it to those immersion baptizers to get us in: at the University of Chicago, the last 25 cent hold out was the Disciples Divinity House basement. That wasn’t quite as easy for the general public to make use of on the pass-through, since you had to have a key to the front door or know someone to let you in, and you had to go back out the door you came in, unless for some reason the fire exit to the alley was open, so it was a little harder to be subtle about your reason for being there. But for those of us who were House or Out-House Scholars, it was a cheap fix and the Disciples didn’t ask nearly as much in faith as the Baptists had done. (Just kidding, they didn’t really ask us to believe anything at all at Chicago, so I exaggerate in saying they only asked “not nearly as much.”)

Ok, I finally got my ph.d. in 1997, and by then I think the DDH had gone up to at least 35 cents, by close vote of the House Council, and machines across campus were running anywhere between fifty cents and seventy five. Hotels had gone up to a dollar a coke on the machines in their hallways, and movie theaters were out of sight with what they were charging for drinks, and for popcorn too. Restaurants, however, were really all over the map, and of course by then that included pepsi and a host of flavors, amounts of sugar and caffeine, and even fruit flavors in the cans, not just at soda fountains where they added real limes or cherry syrup. Moving from the south I discovered that some strange people thought “coke” only referred to a coca cola, not all soft drinks. What a strange idea that was the first time I heard it!

Another new idea was born, as restaurants tried to decide what to charge: the idea of soft drinks as being a drink that entitled you to refills, like tea or coffee or water. That certainly would have been laughed at if anyone had suggested it back when coke was a nickel. Of course, cokes were a LOT stronger back in the fifties, so a large coke, which cost a dime, was about all the caffeine any kid could handle. Somewhere in there fast food restaurants came alone and the size of sizes began to change almost day to day, along with the price.

Raise your hand if what Wendy’s now calls “small” was what McDonald’s sold as “large,” not so very long ago. Really, it wasn’t long ago at all. The old “small” is now “senior size” or even “kid’s size,” depending on where you are. Current “large” didn’t even exist until after it had been introduced as the “super size” for hot summers in the south. Most places do offer free refills now, which seems to give at least a nod to the idea that coffee and tea drinkers might well be using as much sugar as coke drinkers, which I argued back in 1967 or so! Why didn’t they raise the price of coffee, I asked, as I watched friends stir spoonful after spoonful of sugar into their nickel cup of coffee, and its free refills, while I paid a dime for my one coke and never thought of getting a free refill. Well, of course they didn’t raise the price of coffee because people would never have stood for it. Remember that argument?

It was related to the “people will stop driving before they pay $2.00 a gallon for gas,” or was that $3.00? or maybe $4.00? We didn’t find out who would stop driving if it got to $5.00, at least not where I live, but the common wisdom was defeated with all the other increases, so that one would have probably gone through too. Now more people complained about the price of gas than complained when coke went from a nickel to a dime, but that was only a matter of scale and of who was doing the buying, I want to argue.

The reasons for coke going to a dime and on from there and gas going to — well, whatever the oil barons want to charge — are just about the same. We boycott Cuban sugar so coke goes up. We subsidize oil companies and sleep with the shieks, so they can charge whatever they want, and brag about it to congress, and pay themselves bigger and bigger bonuses to go with the higher prices of everything.

That’s my nickel’s worth on the economy. I don’t bother watching for the Dow Jones numbers. I know what’s happening by the price of a coke. That’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it. That’s making me thirsty, so I’m headed to get a coke now, check you later.