five-cent soda
Talk about tech hurdles.
Did you know that Coca-Cola sold their soda at five cents a bottle for seventy years? Not 7, not 17…70 years. Between 1890 and 1959 there were three wars, the Great Depression, inflation...and they never raised the price.
They're a company invested in making money, as you well know. Except that they had a major problem: their vending machines could only accept nickels. Since they didn't wanna double the cost of their product or go to the trouble of altering every single vending machine, they stuck with the same price for seven decades.
I have so many questions.
Wouldn't people have paid ten cents for a bottle back in the day? The stuff is addictive.
Why didn't the machine’s inventor consider coins of different sizes?
How come they stuck to vending machines and didn't move to cart-pushing salespeople?
And yet, Coca-Cola is still here. They're now a $262 billion-dollar company.
They kept their beloved product available and affordable, even when prices on basic goods (butter, sugar) went up and down for decades. They didn't throw up their hands, chuck the machines, or overprice their product in reaction to their major problem. They found other ways to bring in revenue. You can, too.
When you’re stuck on a major problem, how major is it, really?
If you can’t seem to pull the trigger on hiring the right people or you keep “forgetting” to send follow-up emails or you scroll through feeds deciding what captions to write, you know that avoiding even the smallest of actions can wreak havoc on your own reactions. The minor issues snowball into major problems that can become all-consuming. That’s where you get stuck.
Maybe the major problems you’re hung up on aren’t problems at all. What if they’re merely distractions from the progress you could be making?
See you soon,