Play the 1951 coin cooler
Every nickel buys a Coke, except one in every nine: watch for the empty bottle in the rack.
The plan's own maths: 9 nickels = 45¢ for 8 Cokes = 5.625¢ a Coke, "the only price at which it is offered" (Coca-Cola's Eugene Kelly, 1951, quoted by Levy & Young). Our machine is a rebuild for fun, not the real mechanism.
Where is your price stuck?
Coke's nickel was stuck in three places: a contract, ads on every wall, and 400,000 machines that took one coin. Tick every place your price is printed, promised or built in.
Tick the places above.
What one small raise is worth
Coke couldn't go from 5¢ to 6¢ without pennies in every machine. You probably can. Here is what it's worth, even if a few buyers leave.
The receipts
Every fact in the reel, from one peer-reviewed paper that worked from the Coca-Cola Company Archive: D. Levy & A. T. Young, "The Real Thing": Nominal Price Rigidity of the Nickel Coke, 1886-1959, Journal of Money, Credit and Banking 36(4), 2004, pp. 765-799.
- 1886A Coke costs 5¢. It stays 5¢ until 1959: 73 years. (p. 765, p. 795)
- 1899A bottling contract lets bottlers buy syrup at $0.92 a gallon "in perpetuity". (p. 771)
- 1920The company is losing $29,000 a day because it can't raise that price; bottlers take it to court. (p. 773)
- 1921A new contract: $1.17 a gallon, plus 6¢ for every 1¢ that sugar rises above 7¢ a pound. (p. 773-774)
- 1950About 400,000 Coca-Cola vending machines, most of them nickel-only. A dime meant doubling the price; 6¢ or 7¢ meant penny mechanisms. (p. 783-787)
- 1951The pricing team's "Single Coin Plan": one nickel in every nine buys an empty bottle or no bottle, the "official blank". A 1951 company phone transcript says it was tried experimentally in Canada, and perhaps in Chicago; how long isn't known, and it was dropped. (p. 774, p. 786 and note 35)
- 1959The last nickel Coke is gone. (p. 774)
Left out on purpose: the famous story that Coke asked President Eisenhower for a 7.5¢ coin. The paper repeats it from two books, but The E-Sylum (27 Jan 2013) reports that neither the Coca-Cola archives nor the Eisenhower Library hold any record of it.