Dear Mr. Cola [Move Edition]

Are you… okay over there, buddy?

This is my third letter to you in the last nine months, because you keep releasing these “new” “limited edition” “flavors” and the only real way I can accurately describe this release parade of yours is: increasingly unhinged.

First, we had Starlight flavored Coke. That was weird enough - it’s not like you can stick your tongue out and catch starlight on your tongue like you’re an innocent four year old in a snowstorm in a 1950s Christmas movie. But you know what, fine, at least starlight is actually a thing we can experience in our realities.

Then, there was Dreamworld flavored Coke. To be honest, I still haven’t figured that one out, but I did figure that by the time that soda hit the shelves, your speed-fueled binge of product creation would have spent itself out in 36 straight hours of sleep and an all-hands Come To Jesus intervention by your executive team.

I guess I was wrong. Because (I assume) upon emerging from your speed binge like a caterpillar from a cocoon, one of your craven executives gave you a tall glass of water, and you looked that coward in the eye and you said: “We can no longer invent products that taste like tangible things. We need to create conceptual products.” Then (I assume) you looked at the glass of water, hurled it through the nearest window, and screamed at your former pet executive “You STOLE fizzy lifting drinks! You bumped into the ceiling which now needs to be washed and sterilized! You get Nothing! You Lose!” and (I assume) you shouted “I SAID GOOD DAY!” as you threw that yellow-bellied sapsucker of a product director out the window after his traitorous glass of water.

And then you sat down, and you got to work. And what came out was… man I don’t even know. This… I guess it’s soda? “Transformation Flavored” Limited Edition Coca-Cola Move.

I am a connoisseur of crap products, sir, but I must admit that I was a bit nonplussed, a bit taken aback, when I found your conceptual soda on the endcap of an aisle at my local greengrocer’s, Mr. Meyer’s. What, exactly, does transformation taste like? What does any abstract concept taste like? Is this exploration? Or is this colonization? I can’t say that the packaging, covered in cryptic symbols as it is, helped explain anything about what I should expect from this product. You had been working on building a mystery, holding on and shipping it out, and I had to choose so carefully, just like Sarah McLachlan, to take your soda in my arms, the arms of an angel.

So I brought your soda home, and then I was seized by self-doubt. What if you weren’t actually making conceptual soda? I could only think of two things that “transformation” might refer to: electrical transformation, and Hasbro’s Transformers.

What does electrical transformation taste like? I grew up around big machines at my parents’ business, and I imagined that you might have made a soda that tasted like my childhood: solvents, ozone, the fine magnetic dust that drifts off video tapes, electrical fires, melting plastic. And honestly, that’s not too far off from what normal old Coca-Cola tastes like! So that was a possibility.

I’m no expert in Hasbro’s Transformers, but it just so happens that one of my colleagues is, so I asked him before a meeting today what, in his expert opinion, transformation tasted like. He gave me a long, piercing look, and then finally said “What?” in a perfectly flat aspect, so I had to explain to him what the hell I was talking about. I’m not sure that my explanation actually made me look any better or sound any saner? But he answered me, laughing, and said “I don’t know, oil? Lubricants? PCBs?” Did you maybe make a soda that tasted like that?

With these three possibilities spread before me, I finally worked up the nerve to crack a can, and…

Right off the bat I can honestly state that this soda is fucking vile, sir. It’s really the first thing I thought. Just… fucking vile. It’s got a lot of the same flavor elements as the Starlight flavored Coca-Cola – vanilla, raspberry, powdered sugar – but for some ungodly reason you crammed this shit so full of artificial-ass caramel flavoring that it feels like I’m scraping Halloween from my mouth. Its got so much shitty caramel that it tastes like my mouth is burning. It tastes like you distilled the essence of a thousand Sugar Babies and firehose-blasted them through my teeth and straight into my throat.

The speed-fueled product binge is the only way to have this make sense, sir. You must have said to yourself – or even out loud to your even-more-cowed-than-before executive team “People already hate us for our Starlight Coke, let’s make it fucking worse and sell it to the people again, and while we’re at it see what pop singers we have on retainer to shill for us so we take them down with us” and since you already had Rosalía in your pocket you tossed her on the packaging too so she would share your miserable fall.

I just, sir, had another sip, because I thought to myself “it couldn’t have been that bad, could it?” The answer, sir, is yes, yes it is that bad.

Questions of quality aside, however, the question of conceptual or not is still up for grabs. There’s nothing particularly oily about this product, so I don’t think you were trying to make Hasbro’s Transformers. And all Coke tastes a bit like solvent, so I think we can safely leave out electrical transformation as a goal, which leaves us with only conceptual transformation.

What your speed-addled brain forgot, sir, is that like most concepts, transformation is neither inherently good or bad. A caterpillar transforms itself into a beautiful butterfly; this is generally considered to be good. Mr. Musk transformed Twitter from a mostly functional website into a dumpster fire; this is generally considered bad. You have chosen a concept that could have gone either way, and instead of choosing the path of the butterfly, you have chosen the path of Apartheid Clyde.

All I can hope, sir, after tasting this truly horrid concoction you have had the absolute gall to sell to innocent American consumers, is that you yourself transform. While I would hope that you transform yourself once again into a captain of industry, focused on the good of your company and the good of America, I fear it is far more likely you will transform yourself into a down on your luck drifter, sleeping in gutters and holding a handwritten cardboard sign that says “will design concept-based flavors for food.”

Sincerely,

Alex Parise