USA Today's Section B on page 8 has a review of the book "The Real Thing: Truth and Power at the Coca-Cola Company" by Constance L. Hays. This paragraph ffrom the review I think will give you an idea of what the book is about. All poor grammar is mine. I'm not taking time to check spelling.
Once Hays sets the table with her history of Coke's bottler system, she gets into the meat of the story: how a team of executives, Coke's CEO Roberto Goizueta, president Don Keough and CFO Doug Ivester, systematically took control of the bottler system in the 1980s and early 1990s by buying out individual bottlers.
I picked up the book today at BN because it was 20% off. It will be a few days before I start but from what I've seen it takes about 50 of the 416 pages to cover the first 75 or so years of Coke history then the focus is on the mid 80s with New Coke and the 90s with problems in Belgium and problems with racial issues within the company. There does seem to be bottler history in most of the chapters but I have not flipped thru it much.

The thing about the buyouts seems interesting, but I couldn't care less about the problems in Belgium.

I was flipping through the book last night and there are lots of interesting bits on the havoc CCE has caused with retailers, a soda fountain, independant Coke bottlers and some RC bottlers in Texas and Louisiana. The chapter on the RC bottlers losing business because of CCE's contracts with retailers looks very interesting.

And Kalil said something that we've all seen in stores (and even talked about on the board) -- the bottlers forcing retailers to take the slow moving brands along with the top sellers.

"They are taking a good product and tying a dog product onto it." (p. 245).

Some of the stuff in this book is pretty mind-blowing for someone who has worked for this company for quite a few years (like myself). I cheated and read a chapter later in the book (the one I just quoted), but now I've started over and I've read the first 30 pages.

A lot of familiar names, and it's interesting to see how things initally played out with the company and the bottlers (and the antagonistic relationship between the two, which was the catalyst for Coke creating CCE).

Capitalist propaganda...

Sounds like an interesting book, I might have to get it. I've wanted an update on the 1980 book "The Cola Wars" which has several chapters about the dirty sides of the industry, and doesn't pull it's punches for either Coke or Pepsi.

andy

Picked up the book on Sunday,. Pretty iteresting book so far...