Pushkin.

Hello Tim.

Here the Cautionary Tales team is taking a well earned summer vacation.

Here is another classic episode from the archives, a tale about Pepsi's disastrous bottle cap promotion and a man who bought over a thousand chocolate puddings enjoy in a tin roof chack.

In a slum of Manila, the capital of the Philippines, Victoria Angelo lived with her husband Tuinito, and their five children.

Tuinito was a rickshaw driver.

He made around four dollars a day.

Life was a daily grind.

Hard work alone offered no route out of poverty.

So when when the Pepsi Cola company started a new promotion in nineteen ninety two, Victoria took notice.

Number fever seemed easy to understand by a bottle of Pepsi, and under the bottle cap you'd see printed a three digit number and a cash prize amount.

Every night on the Channel two TV news program, Pepsi would announce a winning number.

If you had a bottle cap with that number, you'd win the amount shown.

The prizes went up to a million pesos some forty thousand dollars.

It would take Guanito thirty years to earn that.

Victoria started buying Pepsi.

Every night she watched Channel two for the announcement of the winning number, and she checked her growing collection of bottle caps, and every night she was disappointed.

Until one night the televis announced the number three four nine.

Hold on, Victoria was sure she had a bottle cap marked three four nine.

Here it is now, what's the amount on the cap?

One million pesos.

You can finish school, you can go to college, she told her children.

We can buy a real house.

It seemed like a dream come true.

But unknown to Victoria, something very strange was happening in homes all across the Philippines.

Exactly the same scene was playing out.

Families were watching Channel two, checking their collection of bottle caps, discovering that they had one printed with three four nine and a million peso prize, and celebrating their incredible good fortune.

What had happened, it's not clear exactly.

Instead of printing just two bottle caps with three four nine on them, they'd accidentally printed hundreds of thousands, and nobody at Pepsi had noticed the problem.

But three p four nine had just been announced as a winning number.

Pepsi would notice the problem soon enough.

I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to cautionary tales.

In Worcester, England, a physicist called Phil Calcutt was doing his regular shop at his local supermarket Tesco.

As he strolled down the frutile, a special offer caught his attention by a bunch of bananas and get twenty five Tesco club card points.

The bananas cost one pound than seventeen pence.

The points were worth fivepence each.

Mister Calcutt did the math.

He'd get club card points worth eightpence more than the bananas cost.

Could that be right?

He double checked his mental arithmetic.

Yes, he'd make a profit of eightpence on every bunch of bananas he bought.

So mister Calcott piled his trolley seven feet high with bananas.

Then he got another trolley and filled that with bananas too.

My living room were stacked from floor to ceiling with twenty five cases containing around three thousand bananas.

But when I popped back for some more, they said they would only sell me one case, which is quite understandable because they seemed to be making a loss on it.

When he'd redeemed his Tesco club Card points, mister Calcott ended up with a profit of twenty five pounds and twelvepence, a modest sum, perhaps, but far more valuable was all the fun he had distributing free bananas like some comic book superhero around his neighborhood.

Children in the street now shout Banana Man whenever they see me.

Whoever in Tesco's marketing department had proposed that promotion evidently hadn't done the math, nor had the manager who signed off on it, nor had any of Tesco's millions of other customers.

Only one man had noticed banana man.

Is that surprising?

Probably not if you're the mathematician John Alan Paulos, who wrote the classic book in Numeracy.

Pauloss tells the story of watching the TV news with a friend, a notoriously pedantic friend, the sort who'd correct you for saying continuously when you mean continually.

The weather forecast came on.

There's a fifty chance of rain on Saturday and a fifty chance on Sunday, so certain to be rain this weekend.

Paulos turned to his friend.

Did you hear that?

How embarrassing?

What was I'm sure you've noticed the forecast's mistake In fact, there's a one in four chance of no rain, the same probability of flipping a coin twice and getting two tails.

It's the seventy five percent chance of weekend rain.

Obviously it is.

I mean, oh yeah, sure.

When it comes to numbers, said Paulos.

Even the smartest among us are unobservant.

Companies know that they take advantage of it all the time.

We see the low monthly payment in big type and forget to multiply by the number of months we keep paying our monthly gym membership instead of dividing it by our monthly visits, and seeing we should switch to pay as you go.

We buy extended warranties on household appliances when some simple probability would suggest we should take our chances.

Number fever played on that numerical laziness.

Flip the cap off your bottle of PEPSI, see a three digit number and a million payso prize, and you might naturally get the impression that you have a one in a thousand chance of winning.

Not too shabby and not true.

Of course, Think about it, and you'd quickly realize that Pepsi must have printed far more losing numbers than winning ones, wouldn't they The true chance of winning was vastly smaller than one in a thousand and number.

When consumers fail to do the sums, we get screwed.

But what happens when it's the companies that mess up?

As we'll see, the answer is often that consumers still get screwed, often but not always.

An engineer called David Phillips was shopping in his local suitmarket in Davis, California, in nineteen ninety nine.

He noticed a new promotion by a food brand called Healthy Choice.

Send in ten barcodes from their products and they'd give you five hundred air miles.

They'd double it to a thousand if you sent them in before a certain deadline.

Just like banana man Phil Calcutt, mister Phillips paused to do the math.

How much is an air mile worth?

That can vary depending on how you redeem them, but Phillips calculated one air mile was surely worth at least two cents.

His family liked Healthy Choice frozen meals, which cost two dollars.

Ten frozen meals twenty dollars.

Send in the barcodes and he'd get a thousand air miles also worth at least twenty dollars, who said there was no such thing as a free lunch.

Phillips filled his freezer.

Then he thought, what else is in the Healthy Choice line?

If he could find products for cheaper than two dollars, he'd be getting back more in air miles than he would spend on the food.

I found Healthy Choice soups that were less than a dollar tin soup perfect, It would keep forever and didn't need more freezer space.

David bought all the Healthy Choice soups in his local supermarket.

Then he went to other nearby supermarkets and bought all their Healthy Choice soups.

Too Soon he'd accumulated eight hundred cans of soup.

By this point, David's wife, Cindy was wondering if this might all be a little too good to be true.

Are you sure you haven't missed something in the small print?

Maybe there's a limit on how many miles you can claim.

David poured over the terms and conditions.

In return.

For every ten barcodes and proof of purchase, it said Healthy Choice would issue a certificate for air miles.

The certificates could be redeemed with six different airlines, and while two of them did indeed stipulate a limit on how many certificates they would redeem, the other four didn't.

In fact, the offer told consumers to remember there was no limit to the number of miles they could earn.

With just three weeks to go before the deadline, mister Phillips stumbled on a startling new opportunity.

One supermarket chain grocery outlet had started selling Healthy Choice chocolate puddings for just twenty five cents.

Remember, Healthy Choice was effectively offering air miles worth at least two dollars on every one of those puddings.

There was no time to lose.

I drove to about fifteen grocery store outlet stores in a weekend.

I filled up my van with chocolate pudding.

After that, I made contact with a local grocery store outlet manager had him special order me sixty more cases.

David Phillips now had over twelve thousand chocolate puddings and a problem.

Two problems.

In fact, how would his family ever eat all those puddings?

The second problem was more pressing, how would he manage to peel off twelve thousand barcodes in just three weeks.

But mister Phillips was a resourceful man, and he realized he could solve both problems at once.

He contacted his local food bank and offered to donate all the chocolate puddings if their volunteers would do him the favor of taking off the barcodes for him.

They said yes.

Phillips meticulously organized his barcodes into bundles of ten and filled in the claims forms over a thousand of them, enough for over a million air miles.

That would basically be all the long haul holidays his family could ever want.

David Phillips posted off his barcodes and waited.

There was no immediate reply from Healthy Choice, but he'd read the small print that said it would take six to eight weeks for the air mile certificates to arrive.

Six weeks past, then eight weeks now, Phillips was starting to get worried.

With still no response from Healthy Choice, he phoned them up Disaster.

They said they had no record of receiving any barcodes from him at all.

Cautionary tales will return after this message.

After Channel two News announced that three four nine was the winning number on the Pepsi bottle tops, crowds of jubilant customers descended on Pepsi plants to claim their prizes.

Million It soon became clear that something had gone horribly wrong.

How much would it cost Pepsi to honor all the prizes upwards of fifteen billion dollars.

It was roughly half the Philippin's gross domestic product.

More to the point, it was close to the entire market capitalization of the Pepsi Corporation, not just in the Philippines, but the whole world.

There was simply no way that Pepsi could afford it.

Panicked executives held a crisis meeting at three o'clock in the morning.

They apologized for the computer glitch.

They pointed out that every bottle cap also contained a security code and explained that this would identify the two bottle caps they had intended to be winners, and for everyone else with a three four nine bottle top.

They decided to offer a goodwill payment of five hundred pesos, a mere twenty dollars.

The bottle tops came flooding in four hundred and eighty six thousand, one hundred and seventy of them.

The goodwill payments cost Pepsi about ten million dollars, five times what they'd initially budgeted for the entire Number Fever campaign, But it wasn't enough to quell everyone's outrage.

Thousands of people kept hold of their three four nine bottle tops.

They'd thought their lives were about to change forever.

Now they were being offered just twenty dollars.

That wasn't going to buy their goodwill.

They were determined to make PEPSI pay.

David Phillips was determined two He'd gone to all that trouble, buying eight hundred tins of soup and twelve thousand chocolate puddings, organizing all the barcodes, filling in all the forms, and now he learned that the package he had sent to Healthy Choice had apparently gone missing.

This seemed pretty incredible, given that I mailed the package registered and someone on their end signed for the package.

But would a man as meticulous as David Phillips failed to plan for that eventuality Not likely.

Phillips had photocopied everything.

He'd even videotaped himself buying the chocolate puddings and stacking them up in his house, just to be on the safe side.

Presented with this evidence.

Healthy Choice quickly caved mister Phillips got his air miles.

Think for a moment about what David Phillips did.

He hadn't just done one calculation, the numerical one that showed the sums on the chocolate puddings didn't add up.

He'd made a second kind of calculation, too, a pragmatic calculation about how things work in the real world.

All along, I was somewhat worried that Healthy Choice wouldn't honor the deal.

Packages do sometimes go missing, It's true, so it taken practical steps to make it expensive for Healthy Choice to refuse him his air miles, ensuring that if the company tried to back out of the deal, the media would have a field day with the story.

Companies, too, make both kinds of calculations about their marketing offers, numerical and pragmatic.

Sometimes they fall down on the numbers.

It makes no sense to pay shoppers to buy bananas, But on some marketing offers, they know the numbers wouldn't add up if everyone took advantage, and they rely on the pragmatic calculation that many customers won't bother.

That's what's happening when retailers offer rebates on a purchase.

Rather than simply reduce the price, they make you pay full price, then mail off the receipt or the barcode to claim your rebate.

Whether such promotions pay off depends on what proportion of customers actually do claim.

There's even a term of art for the percentage of consumers who fail to follow through the breakage rate.

Marketing professors Tim Silk and Chris Yanishevski study the factors that affect breakage rates.

There are principles from psychology textbooks, such as hyperbolic discounting.

That's the tendency to put higher value on more immediate rewards.

Promise a rebate, check quickly and you'll motivate people to apply.

Promise it in six to eight weeks, and maybe they won't bother then there are sneaky little tricks putting the barcode on tough, thick cardboard that's hard to cut with household scissors.

Increasing the breakage rate is a serious and cynical business.

When the UK branch of Hoover launched a big new promotion in nineteen ninety two, they gambled on a high breakage rate.

They were offering two free flights to Europe to anyone who spent one hundred pounds on a Hoover appliance.

That's about two hundred and fifty dollars in today's money.

It's not a bad deal at all.

In fact, it's such a good deal that Hoover knew they couldn't afford for too many customers to take up the offer, so they made it logistically difficult.

You had to snail mail the receipt for the item you'd purchased and wait for Hoover to send you a form, fill that in, and wait for Hoover to send you a voucher.

Then you had to choose three possible dates and destinations and wait for Hoover to let you know if any of them were available, and on and on.

Only the most determined customers had the patience to persevere to the point where they actually got on a plane.

It looks like who managed to keep the breakage rate high enough to make their giveaway deal profitable.

Then Hoover became over confident they decided to expand the offer to include flights to America.

This was a much bigger incentive.

Two return flights from Britain to America cost about five times the price of a Hoover vacuum cleaner, and Hoover's pragmatic calculation about breakage was way off beam Far more people applied for flights than they'd expected.

Crucially, the applicants also proved far more tenacious than Hoover had hoped.

Many initially heard nothing back.

When they followed up, Hoover said their application forms must have been lost in the post.

They became prostrated and suspicious.

David Dixon, a horse trainer in Cumbria, was among the disgruntled customers who'd bought a Hoover appliance a washing machine in his case, and then had trouble claiming his free flights to America.

I have fucked them, I have written of them, I have formed them, And then, to add insult to injury, his washing machine broke down.

Hoover sent a technician who failed to sympathize with mister Dixon's plight.

According to the technician, the offer was obviously too good to be true.

Mister Dixon should surely have realized there must be some kind of catch.

If do you think bang a washing machine's going to get you two tickets to America.

You must be an idiot.

An idiot, eh, we'll see about that.

While the technician was fixing his washing machine, mister Dixon drove his horse box in front of the Hoover truck, blocking it in.

He told the technician to walk home and pass on a message to his employers.

Well, I'll get me tickets, they'll get their vun Mister Dixon became something of a folk hero.

The BBC meanwhile sent an undercover reporter to investigate what was going on.

She got a job in the agency that was processing the applications for free flights on Hoover's behalf.

It went something like this, So what would you like me to do.

Here's a list of people.

Contact them and offer them flights from London.

These people all live in Glasgow.

That's four hundred miles from London.

That's right.

But the person sitting next to me is phoning people who live in London and telling them we can only offer them flights from Glasgow.

You get you on fast love.

When the BBC investigation was broadcast, it did not play well for Hoover.

They eventually begrudgingly bought over two hundred thousand flights at a cost of over seventy million dollars.

The majority of customers had given up without getting their flights, but the company's reputation had taken a hit, so had their market share in the UK.

Part of the problem was that anyone who wanted a Hoover appliance could find plenty of attractive deals in the classified ads never used still in their original packaging, people had bought them just to get the air tickets.

No wonder.

Hoover's parent company fired the executives who'd approved the promotion and quietly sold off the European arm of the company for a knockdown price.

For Pepsi executives in the Philippines, merely getting fired might have seemed like a relief compared to the continuing disaster of number fever.

They were getting so many death threats they needed round the clock security.

Pepsi erected barbed wire barricades around its processing plants.

Dozens of its trucks were attacked.

In one tragic case, a grenade thrown at a Pepsi truck in Manila bounced off and killed a school teacher and a five year old girl.

The small print of the number fever adverts did mention the existence of a security code on the bottle tops, but was it sufficiently clear that the prize depended on the security code, not just on the three digit number.

Pepsi found itself fighting thousands of lawsuits after this message cautionary tales will return, even as the number fever lawsuits raged on.

Pepsi found itself once again in a numerical dispute described in Matt Parker's book of mathematical mishaps, Humble Pie.

This dispute followed yet another promotion called Pepsi Points, this time running in the United States.

A thirty second advert starts with the caption Monday, seven fifty eight am and an external shot of an ordinary suburban house.

Cut to the inside of the house.

A cool young dude is wearing a T shirt with a Pepsi logo.

He slicks back his hair, T shirt seventy five Pepsi points, flashes the on screen caption.

He dons a leather jacket.

Leather jacket fourteen hundred and fifty Pepsi points on go the sunglasses one hundred and seventy five Pepsi points.

Then a voiceover he.

Introduced on you pepsy Stuff chattle are Now the more pepsi you drinks are more great stuff you're going to get.

Meanwhile, on screen, there's a school classroom.

From outside, there's some kind of loud noise and strong wind blowing books and papers everywhere.

Other students watch in amazement as the cool dude arrives in a Harrier jump jet doing a vertical land in the school yard.

He steps out sipping a can of pepsi, and on screen Harrier Fighter seven million pepsi points.

Sure be the bus?

Ah, yes, very good?

But hold on, has anyone done the math on this?

A can of pepsi was one point, but once you had a few points from Pepsi purchases, you could buy additional points for ten cents apiece, So a T shirt at seventy five points was effectively seven dollars fifty fair enough, a leather jacket one hundred and forty five dollars not unreasonable.

And a Harrier Fighter, let's see seven million times ten cents, that's seven hundred thousand dollars.

Doesn't that sound cheap for a fighter jet?

The US military paid over twenty million dollars for each of its AV eight Harrier two jump jets.

If you could get one from Pepsi for seven hundred thousand dollars, that would be an absolute steal.

There were a few cultures now very rare, whose counting words only cover one two big number.

But that's because they rarely need to talk about large numbers.

Modern marketing executives do.

And yet when it came to the Harrier, Pepsi's decision makers were helpless.

Once those Pepsi points started mounting up, all they could seem to think was big number.

Enter twenty one year old business student John Leonard.

He somehow raised seven hundred thousand dollars, which he deposited with a lawyer.

He bought fifteen cans of Pepsi and sent off his fifteen Pepsi points with a check for seven one hundred thousand and eight dollars and fifty cents.

That was to cover the remaining six million, nine hundred and ninety nine thou nine hundred and eighty five Pepsi points plus the ten dollars delivery charge.

Pepsi wrote back, politely.

The item that you have requested is not included in the catalog or on the order form.

The Harrier jet and the Pepsi commercial is fanciful.

We apologize for any misunderstanding or confusion that you may have experienced.

Mister Leonard had his lawyer swing into action.

Your letter of May seven, nineteen ninety six is totally unacceptable.

We have reviewed the videotape at the Pepsi stuff commercial and it clearly offers the new Harriet jet for seven million Pepsi points.

This is a formal demand that you on ayach commitment and make immediate arrangements to transfer the new Harriot Jet to our client.

The case went to court, where District Judge kimber Wood had to decide if the advert was serious.

She came to the understandable conclusion that it wasn't.

The callow youth featured in the commercial is a highly improbable pilot.

The teenager's comment that flying a Harrier Jet to school sure beats the bus evinces an improbably insussient attitude toward the relative difficulty and danger of piloting a fighter plane in a residential area as opposed to taking public transportation.

Might some other court take a different view?

Probably not, But Pepsi decided to edit its commercial just in case.

Harrier now cost seven hundred million Pepsi points.

Again big number, but this time big enough.

I assume John Leonard knew that his chance of winning the case was small, and that if he lost, there'd be lawyer's fees to pay.

It must have been a calculated gamble.

Judge Kimberwood summed up why she wasn't letting that gamble pay off.

An objective reasonable person would conclude that purchasing a fighter plane for seven hundred thousand dollars is a deal too good to be true?

Fair enough, But can we predict if a corporate marketing bungle is likely to have a happy ending?

Can we come up with a taxonomy of the too good to be true from these stories?

Perhaps we can.

It's all about that pragmatic calculation.

Imagine, if you will a tool beloved by marketing types, a two by two matrix, how much will it cost the company to pay up and how bad will it make the company look to wriggle out In one corner?

Expensive promises with an easy get out.

In this corner is John Leonard with his video of the Pepsi staff ad Harrier jets are expensive and did it make Pepsi look unreasonable to fight the case, not really.

At the other extreme cheap promises with no means of escape, here stands David Phillips with his stack of chocolate puddings.

Giving one customer a pile of air miles wasn't especially expensive set against the entire healthy Choice marketing campaign, and thanks to his videotape, they could hardly wriggle out.

The other two corners of the two by two matrix are more ambiguous.

Giving Tesco club card points to banana man was a trivial expense, but nobody would have cared much if they'd refused.

The financial stakes were low, and so were the publicity stakes.

It could have gone either way.

Tesco's one crate banana limit seems a reasonable compromise.

It can also go either way when both stakes are high.

That's why some Hoover buyers got their flights and some didn't.

It was the worst possible combination for any company.

They looked awful for trying to wriggle out of their own promises, and those they were forced to keep were ruinously expensive.

But perhaps Hoover's marketers had always had their doubts deep down.

The tagline for their free flights campaign was two return seats.

Unbelievable in the Philippines.

Number fever left the three four nine bottle top holders facing their own pragmatic calculation.

Take Pepsi's goodwill twenty dollars or fight.

Fifteen thousand Filipinos joined a pressure group called Coalition three, set up by Vicente Delfiero Junior, a public relations consultant and a fiery preacher.

Mister Delfiero flew to New York to file yet another lawsuit against Pepsi, modestly describing himself as.

A Filipino Don Quixote, a Biblical David going up against a global Golaiad.

He drew sneers and laughs from the appity New Yorkers, but he remained undonted and fearless.

The Pepsi three four nine fiasco mirrors how irresponsible multinational organizations abuse consumers in developing countries.

Vicente Delfiero was tapping into a sense of injustice that runs much deeper than one botched soft drinks promotion.

Recall what the thought of winning a million pesos had meant to Victoria Angelo.

You can finish school, we can buy real house.

These shouldn't be unrealistic ambitions for anyone.

But it's hardly Pepsi's fault that life is so unfair, And was it ever really likely that a court would make PEPSI pay a sum that was almost its entire market value?

Remember, nearly half a million bottletop holders had accepted the good will payment, far more than joined mister del Fierro's coalition.

They'd pragmatically calculated that this was the most PEPSI could reasonably be expected to do after well over a decade of legal wrangles.

The courts agreed it would be wonderful to imagine a bottletop printing error lifting hundreds of thousands of Filipinos out of poverty.

That that was always going to be too good to be true.

Key sources for this episode include reporting from the Los Angeles Times, the BBC, and The Independent, and a paper on consumer rebates in the Stamford Journal of Law, Business and Finance.

For a full list of references, see Tim Harford dot com.

Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright.

It's produced by Ryan Dilley and Marilyn Rust.

The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise.

Julia Barton edited the scripts.

Starring in this series of Cautionary Tales a Helena Bonham Carter and Jeffrey Wright, alongside Nizzar Eldazi, Ed Gochen, Melanie Gutteridge, Rachel Hanshaw, copenaholbrook Smith, Greg Lockett, Messeamunroe and Rufus Wright.

This show wouldn't have been possible without the work of Mea LaBelle, Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fane, John Schnaz, Carlin Mgliori, Eric Sandler, Emily Ross, Maggie Taylor, Aniela La Khan, and Maya Kanig.

Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries.

If you like the show, please remember to rate, share, and review.