Quote:
Originally Posted by Earl Boebert
In the 1920s my mother worked as a waitress at a Russian River resort called Lane's Redwood Flat. Coca-Cola used to send "secret shoppers" around to make sure the vendors dispensed a full shot of syrup each order. She said that since the place was way out in the forest and a residence resort, the secret shoppers were not hard to spot. Everybody else got a short squirt -- old man Lane was a notorious skinflint :-)
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I could see that happening. The crooked merchant who orders his employees to put less expensive coca cola syrup in a serving makes more profits. The only other ingredient would be the soda water and maybe ice. Was sugar added as well by the soda "jerk"? But in the long run customers would realize that they were being cheated, and not patronize the places that served watered down shots of coca cola. Thanks for the interesting story! That is the pleasure of this blog. All these stories from the past from our mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles, grandmothers and grandfathers.. My mother is 101 and still is full of stories from the deep past. She remembers the late 1920s! She saw the Graf Zeppelin pass over L.A. in 1929! Sometime soon I may share some of her stories from the late 1920s, 1930s and forward.
My mother told me a similar story as yours Earl. In 1939 she worked in a Kress drugstore in downtown L.A. as a clerk, and she told me how the soda jerks watered down the Coke, Dr. Pepper, etc. with less syrup per serving. One of the soda jerks was friendly with my mom and he told her about how he was told to use less syrup by his boss. Maybe it was a store by store thing. The companies who made the syrup got back at the drugstores by bottling their drinks with standard syrup amounts. The soda fountains were mostly gone by the 1960s. Cheating customers never works in the long run. In the same Kress, my mom's boss expected her to cut her hair for free. 1939 was still the depression, and employees were still exploited. My mom told me how she found a much better job at Title Insurance, and how she shocked her Kress boss by quitting. War would end the Depression, and the power balance shifted back to the employees now in short supply.
What I find amazing is that apparently nobody has figured out the exact ingredients and proportions in the Coca Cola syrup. In these days of chemical analysis, you think it would have been discovered. I think most people still prefer the taste of Coca Cola to other cola drinks. Put a blindfold on me and I can immediately distinguish Coke from Pepsi. Sorry Joan Crawford, Pepsi owner for a while...Coke tastes better to me. Don't hit me with a coat hanger. I only buy Pepsi when Coke is not an alternative. Now if it only had some "coca leaf extract". Energetic bliss. Elon Musk, do us a favor and buy Coke and get us the "real thing" back
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