Getting To Grapple - With Snapple

 If You've Been Reading This Scrivel Long Enough

The you'll know that we occasionally slobber with schadenfreude over an entity or person's incredible fiscal failure, FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried coming to mind as one of the bigger ones of recent years.  

     Well, Your Humble Scribe recently came across an interesting vlog on Youtube from a channel called 'Money Chuck', entitled 'The Worst Business Decisions Ever Explained Like You're 5' and what caught my eye and attention was the first folly.  Art!

The hideous truth

The rather more cartoony Money Chuck version

      I don't propose to go into the Schlitz debacle in any detail, just to say that the manglement tried to successively cut corners to cut costs, ending up with a beer that nobody liked or bought, leading to the company's collapse.  It's so stark a lesson that it's taught in classes on business and marketing.

     ANYWAY today I want to focus on the second story, that of 'Quaker Oats' and 'Snapple'.  First of all, QO is for pansy Sassenachs, in our house it was always 'Scotts' and don't you forget it.  Art!

NEVER WITH SUGAR!  NEVER!  EVER!*

     <ahem> QO were a very successful brand in South Canada and even today you can see the hideous cereal miscegenations they sell, involving maple <shudder> and chocolate <the horror! the horror!>.

     QO's other big success story was 'Gatorade', which I have heard of yet never drunk, and don't consider myself any the poorer for the loss.  It's a sports drink that derives it's peculiar name from a university football team: the Gators.  Supposedly it was concocted to replace fluids and electrolytes lost whilst playing South Canadian rugby, and '-ade' was added since it was a drink.  Art!

Golly gee

     Then there was 'Snapple', a brand of iced tea, which Conrad is highly suspicious of, considering it to be a flat soda coloured brown and with far too much sugar present.  Art!

     The chap behind the brand, Thomas Lee, had successfully built sales by retailing to small independent stores and using quirky television adverts for promotion.  Suddenly! there was QO on his doorstep offering $1.7 billion for the brand, which he snatched from them with glee and departed stage left.

     Such an offer price led to tut-tutting and teeth-sucking on Wall Street, who felt it was overly generous and liable to lead to problems downstream.

     'Nonsense!' declaimed William Smithburg, CEO of QO, 'This is a match made in Heaven!'.

     O rly.

     One would hate to see what he imagined Purgatory or Hades to look like.  Art!

Billy Burgsmith

     QO set out to aggressively market Snapple to large retail chains, eschewing the 'little guy' model Lee had used, which failed miserably.  Then Pepsi and Coco-Cola began releasing their own iced tea brands, and suddenly Snapple wasn't selling at all, never mind badly.  In the summer of '96, Smithburg had tried what was described as an 'exorbitantly expensive' (the 'Chicago Tribune's words, not mine) last-ditch attempt to promote Snapple by having children giving it away for free to passers-by.

     27 months after the acquisition, QO sold Snapple to Triarc Beverages for $300 million, whom turned around and sold the brand (and several others, to be fair) to Cadbury Schweppes a year later for <drum roll> $1.45 billion.  Ooops.  Art!

     This may have been CS acquiring an iced tea brand of their own without having to do any of the onerous research and development.  I hope you're taking notes at this point with all the mergers and acquisitions, since CS itself demerged into Cadbury's, a purely confectionery business, and 'Dr Pepper Snapple Group', embodying the iced tea drink.  Conrad things Dr Pepper tastes like medicine, and faintly unpleasant medicine at that.  I won't go into the further mergers and changes here as it would end up like a family as tall as I am and with eighty-seven branches.

     By this point many corporate heads had rolled at Quaker Oats, because losing $1.4 billion doesn't look good on anyone's resumé and, irony of ironies, Pepsi bought QO in 2001 for $13 billion to acquire Gatorade.  Art!

     Today Bill seems to be involved as a Director of a not-for-profit charity called 'Big Shoulders', helping to fund inner-city schools in Chicago.  Well, there you go.  Helping his hometown.
     Another interesting site I came across doing background for this Intro is 'The Museum Of Failure', which we will definitely be returning to.  I bet you can hardly wait.

Another Demand On My Time

Wellllll less a demand than a self-inflicted commitment, so to speak.  Those of you who keep up with the relentless flow of drivel from BOOJUM! and associated sources will know that Conrad was given a new 1,000 piece jigsaw, valued at pounds three, at the weekend, and is now in the process of starting it.  Art!

     I've gone through the box three times and still cannot find an edge piece, which is either missing or will turn up amongst the last twenty pieces.  What makes this one tricky is that there are two almost identical backgrounds, separated by 30 years, so you're not sure if it's 1914 or 1944.  Just what a compulsive hair-splitting pedant needs!

Yes But Who's Going To Test It

Conrad was struck by a sidebar item on his news feed, enough to take a Snip of the clickbait thumbail.  Art!

     Conrad, being an analytical animal, supposes that there are two issues here.  One is the sheer Puncture Factor of a Great White's teeth, because there's an awful lot of them and they are pretty Dog Buns shark.  Sorry, 'sharp'.  Then there is the Applied Bite Force In Newtons Per Square PROUD IMPERIAL Inch.  It's no use if this super wonder bite-proof wetsuit remains intact whilst you, the wearer, are a rickle of shattered bones within it.  Also, Conrad did a bit of digging.

Scientists have created new wetsuits with bite-resistant materials like ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene (UHMWPE) and Kevlar that can reduce injury severity from shark bites

     Sooooo - it's only 'kinda shark-proof'.  Once again, who on earth is going to volunteer to test this?  Art!

"It'll be mostly safe'

Here's One We've Not Seen For A While

Your Humble Scribe has been holding back on posting even more military-related material whilst posting the pictures from BOVINGTON TANK MUSEUM, as you can most definitely have too much of a good thing.  Art!

     Here we go, "The War Illustrated Edition 214 August 31st 1945".  Yes, the war was over at this point, but don't forget TWI was at least two weeks behind real-time events.  Plus, they wanted to gloat a bit over Japan's utter humiliation, defeat and occupation.

     The soldier here is one of Chiang Kai-Shek's 'National Resistance Army', whom were the Chinese backed by the Allies, and whom fought the Communists just as much as the Japanese invaders.  Not only that, they were as riddled with corruption as the modern-day Mordorvians, so their triumph was rather short-lived.

From 1945 From 2045

Guessing at that future date a bit, but I'm leaving it there thanks to synchronicity as 2192 simply does not scan poetically.  Me being so poetic and shizzle. Yes, we are back on 'Spacedock's 'Five Realistic Interstellar Designs' for spacecraft that Hom. Sap. might be able to build.  Art!

      That 6-mile long monster is a 'Valkyrie', as imagined by Charles Pelegrino.  That miniature in the foreground is the ISV 'Venture Star' from 'Avatar' to give a sense of scale, the Venture Star being a whopping big starship itself.  Art!

     It may not be apparent from this rather sketchy illo, but the Valkyrie has an engine at each end.  This is a deliberate design function based around the etiolated middle structure, because it means the ship does not inflict any stress or shear forces on the loooong thing middle section, which would otherwise happen if it had to rotate and decelerate with a single engine.  Ingenious!  Here's a schematic of the beast.  Art!

     The heat-exchange mechanism is pretty cool, too: an array of magnetically-charged droplets that are sprayed ahead of the spacecraft and which also double as a particle shield during forward travel.

      

     AND WITH THAT WE ARE DONE!

*  I'm not happy about the metric measurement but we've got bigger fish to fry