Five days out from Back to the Future Day and my Twitter feed still hasn't fully recovered. You remember the date, obviously, everyone does now: October 21, 2015, the exact day Marty McFly landed the DeLorean in the future according to Part II. The whole internet lost its mind about it for about 72 hours straight. I'm mostly over it. Mostly.
What I keep coming back to, though, isn't the flying cars we didn't get or the fact that the movie thought we'd all still be wearing self-drying jackets by now. It's Pepsi Perfect.
If you missed it (lucky you), Pepsi actually manufactured the fictional soda bottle from the movie, priced it at $20.15 because of course they did, and put a limited run into select 7-Eleven stores on the day itself. I read somewhere it was something like 6,500 bottles total, maybe a bit more, spread across a handful of markets. They were gone in minutes. Not hours. Minutes. And by that same afternoon there were listings on eBay asking $100, $200, one I saw pushing past $500, for an unopened bottle of soda that, let's be honest, nobody actually wants to drink.
That's the part that gets me. The movie imagined hoverboards and flying DeLoreans and instead the actual future we built is: a company makes 6,500 units of a novelty item on purpose, knowing full well it'll trigger a resale frenzy, and treats the scarcity itself as the marketing campaign. That's not a coincidence or a fluke of demand. That's the plan. Manufactured scarcity dressed up as a nostalgia gift, and we all fell for it, myself included (I did not get a bottle, for the record, and I am still a little bitter about it).
Nike did something similar with the self-lacing shoes, except theirs was more clever because they didn't even sell them yet. They just showed the world that the Nike Mag with actual power-lacing works, real ones, not movie props, and said they'd have them for regular people at some point in 2016. No price, no firm date. Just a video and a promise. And it worked. Every tech blog on the planet ran the story like Nike had cured a disease. I get it, it's a genuinely cool bit of engineering, the motor and the sensor in the heel actually cinch the shoe when you step into it. But the whole rollout was a masterclass in getting a year's worth of press coverage out of a single afternoon of demos.
None of this is a complaint about the day itself, honestly. It was fun. I had it on in the background at work and my coworker kept doing the Doc Brown voice until it stopped being funny, then somehow got funny again around 4pm. I'm just saying, five days later, when you look at what businesses actually shipped versus what they promised, the pattern is pretty consistent: the promise gets the headlines, the scarcity gets the resale market, and the actual product mostly doesn't exist yet.
Small tangent because I can't help myself: I finally saw the Steve Jobs movie this weekend, the Aaron Sorkin one that went wide a few days ago. It's structured as three product launches and basically none of it is about the products, it's all backstage arguments, which I actually loved, though I know a few people who wanted more Apple and less Sorkin dialogue. Michael Fassbender doesn't look anything like Jobs and I stopped caring about that within about ten minutes. Worth seeing if you're into that era at all. Didn't expect to bring it up in a post about Pepsi bottles but here we are, that's how my brain works apparently.
Anyway. If anyone local actually managed to snag a Pepsi Perfect and doesn't want to drink it (nobody drinks it, come on), I'll trade you something. I have opinions about what. We can negotiate.