The three liter bottle of soda

The three liter bottle of soda, not since New Coke has the soda industry made such a huge mistake. Sure it showed a lot of promise. Who doesn't want 50% more soda. The problem is the soda companies didn't do market testing with my mother. You see Sybil saw the flaw right away and exploited it as best she could. If you didn't drink the bottle in one day, you were typically left with one to two liters of flat soda. I for one am not an animal so there was no way I was going to drink flat Coke. Sybil realizing how wasteful this was had to think of something. That something was to return the flat soda.  She would keep an empty bottle on the counter and whenever a bottle went flat she would dump it into the empty bottle.  When it was full, she would march into the supermarket and complain that the three liter bottle clearly had a design flaw and she kept getting flat bottles. Her store credits were of course used to buy more three liter bottles of soda.  

I think the supermarket finally caught on when Sybil put a bit too much Sprite in with the Coke. The 16 year old working customer service just wasn't buying the soda came diarrhea color.  

Coke and Pepsi both agreed the three liter bottle was a marketing failure. To this day I wonder if it was because of all the returns in the north east.