Nothing Like The Real Thing

Stop the presses.  Coca-Cola will have red cans after all during the Christmas season.  After reading about this controversy, I checked at my local grocery and sure enough, the new Coke cans were white.  Why?

The world's largest beverage maker announced in October that it was turning its iconic red cans white as part of a campaign to protect polar bears and their habitat. [....] It was the first time Coca-Cola had changed the color of its cans, and it hoped the striking departure would draw attention to its work with the World Wildlife Fund to protect the bears.

Don't know if I like this. Coke is carbonated sugar water, and it doesn't need anything--not even a good cause--to justify it.  If Coke wants to give money to charities, fine, but don't try to lure in consumers with the promise they're doing good with each purchase, or guilt them into contributing, for that matter.

Apparently the campaign caused trouble because the new cans looked too much like the Diet Coke design. (I agree--it took me a bit to figure out these were regular Coke cans.) The other complaint was the soda tasted different.  Coke promised they hadn't changed anything, but that didn't convince everyone.  So though they're not pulling the white cans, they're adding more red.  The white will remain stocked until it sells, and since there's more than a billion such cans, it may take a while.

If only this was our most pressing problem.