harrier jet
Remember that pepsi comericial from a long time ago showing all the stuff you can get with pepsi points, and at the end it says "harrier jet- 7,000,000 pepsi points" or somthing like that? You can watch it here. So if you bought say a 2 liter bottle of pepsi you'd get some number of points which were redeemable for merchandise, like a pepsi sweatshirt or hat. There was also an option of mailing pepsi and actually paying 10 cents per point, if you just really wanted the merchandise but didn't want to drink all that soda. Today we read a case where a guy got together money from a couple of venture capitalists and bought the 7,000,000 points for $700,000, thinking he would cash them in for the harrier which would retail for something like $15 million. Not a bad return. It turns out that jets are a little harder to get than that, and the court said that the commercial didn't constitute an enforceable offer, so he didn't get the one. I just want to know what he did with all those extra pepsi points afterward.
posted by james at Monday, September 25, 2006
4 Comments:
Lots of skateboards, all with a cool Pepsi logo. Oh, but it turns out he was unable to purchase a life with those points, though all who knew him suggested that he try.
I already had a life...thank you very much!
I mean, he probably got a cat.
so, why wasn't it a real offer? Or, is it just that you can't really force somebody to sell anything, like how a home seller isn't obligated to accept asking-price offers, but then once the contract is signed they do have to sell or else pay damages?
so sometimes you can force people to sell you something. like if you have a contract like you said. the question is what does it take to form a contract, and whether or not the offer in this commercial got pepsi into one. there a lots of rules abou this. a lot of it is about whether an agreement to sell something ought to be taken seriously based on the circumstances of the offer. if i make a promise to sell something, the other person has to believe in good faith that i'm serious about it. and if my actions lead that person to think this way, then i am bound. in this case, pepsi argued that the offer should have been seen as certainly a joke, and therefore not valid, because the price was too good to be true. also, a reasonable person should have known that pepsi can't just buy fighter jets. there are lots of other issues. and i don't know much about this stuff yet. but that's the thing we talked about most in class.
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