Coca-Cola was originally only available from soda fountains, at 5 cents per glass. The exclusive bottling rights for Coke were purchased in 1899 by a trio of entrepreneurs. According to the terms of the deal, the rights included the ability to buy Coke syrup at a fixed price in perpetuity. This meant that the bottlers could increase their prices to keep pace with inflation, but the Coca-Cola Company couldn't increase the price of their syrup in response.
In order to sell as much syrup as possible under these conditions, Coca-Cola advertised as widely as possible that bottles of Coke cost 5c, which made it very difficult for shops selling the bottles to increase the price. Consequently a bottle of Coke remained 5c for around 70 years.
More about Coca-Cola:
- As selling drinks in bottles was a new idea and wasn't expected to be popular, the original rights to bottle Coca-Cola were sold for only $1.
- Soda vending machines were originally designed to take only a single nickel, which also made it difficult to raise the price of a bottle.
- It's currently estimated that around 1.9 billion servings of Coca Cola beverages are sold every day around the world.