In early February 1950, five separate ministries of the French government conducted investigations into Coca-Cola. With Makinsky leaving for Algiers and facing a delay in the trial against the Coca-Cola bottler there, Ladas was on his own. The contrast with Coca-Cola's home position in the United States could not have been sharper.
Thanks to the war, Coca-Cola was considered one of the things that defined America. Until the passage of the Boulet bill, few Americans had any idea of Coca-Cola's troubles abroad. The lesson of the French affair remained in Coca-Cola's memory for years.
STIRRINGS
One of his many unsuccessful stops was at Pemberton's store in the lobby of the Kimball House. To my surprise, I found all the materials and accessories in the corner of the basement. Observing the latest twist in the fortunes of Coca-Cola, Frank Robinson saw an opportunity.
In the summer of 1890, Candler's second season, sales of Coca-Cola syrup more than quadrupled to 8,855 gallons. In the soda fountains of the South, people started coming in and asking for a Coke. In a trial years later, two disgruntled former employees testified that, in the terms of the time, he was one.
DOPE
Although sales were heaviest in the South, Coca-Cola was becoming a national product, available in every state of the union. Furthermore, the government said, with its sharpest dagger, Coca-Cola contains "the drug and medicine cocaine". Baird, president of the Medical Association of Georgia, who testified that Coca-Cola was definitely habit forming.
In the aftermath of his skirmish with Wiley, Asa Candler began to tire of making and selling Coca-Cola. But 110 miles south, in the general offices of the Coca-Cola Company, the mood was not so festive. But the government did not charge that Coca-Cola was a compound made from coca and kola.
DOBBS
Quickly graduating from life on the road, Dobbs was assigned a desk in Atlanta and took charge of the company's shipping department. In an era when traveling salesmen ("drummers" in the parlance of the day) gained a reputation for playing cards and carousing, Coca-Cola's representatives stood out as exceptions. The tremendous profit margins built into every level of the Coca-Cola business were supposed to keep everyone happy.
Robinson and Dobbs began to bicker over the size and scope of the company's advertising, and their arguments grew increasingly ugly. Massengale created slice-of-life scenes and tried to make Coca-Cola an integral part of the activity. Just as Dobbs and D'Arcy formed an effective partnership overseeing Coca-Cola's advertising, Dobbs and Hirsch became a force for change in directing the company's legal policies.
Dobbs' rise to the top level of the Coca-Cola Company was remarkable, considering the lowliness of his starting position, and it was made even more so. His lifelong goal of becoming president of the company was about to be ripped from his hands. Publicly, Dobbs played the good soldier and continued his duties on behalf of the company.
As Pam saw it, the company's prospects weren't nearly as dire as some of the Candlers thought. With his legacy dispersed, Asa Candler has now withdrawn even further from the business affairs of the company. People were going to buy the stock of the new Coca-Cola Company, and they were.
Howard Candler was tapped to become chairman of the board of directors of the new Coca-Cola Company.
BOTTLED-UP ANGER
In the case of Coca-Cola, he appointed W. Bradley as chairman of the committee, who then took charge of the company's legal and financial affairs. Candler had been in charge of production for more than a decade, and it was the one area of the Coca-Cola Company's operations where his expertise was considered unassailable. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the parent companies' growing wealth ignited a fair amount of anger at the Coca-Cola Company's Atlanta headquarters.
Wiley first filed his suit against Coca-Cola in 1909, one of the company's bottlers, Crawford Johnson of Birmingham, Alabama, took Hirsch aside. The directors of the Coca-Cola Company, he said, planned to meet and cancel the contract. It was crucial for him to maintain the loyalty of the hundreds of Coca-Cola bottlers across the country.
Every detail of the company's business was exposed in the worst possible light, and Woodruff was furious. When Dobbs came out of Hirsch's office, he walked over to Hirsch's desk and wrote his resignation as president of the Coca-Cola Company. In an elegant phrase that accurately captured the essence of the company's argument, Holmes called Coca-Cola "one thing that comes from a single source and is well known to the community."
The outcome of the case was, of course, an enormous relief for the members of the Coca-Cola family. Still, the decision by no means marked the end of the company's problems. Endless delays are being experienced.” The president of the Coca-Cola Company, forty-two years old, sounded more than a little like a homesick schoolboy.
Large blocks of Coca-Cola stock changed hands, with the majority of the purchases coming from New York.
GET YOUR READINESS”
The star of the convention was the company's new vice president of sales, Harrison Jones. Carmody concluded his remarks by describing the giant sign he was building for the company in Times Square in New York City. A newspaper report from the time noted the modern facilities in the house and expressed surprise that “Mrs.
Robert was unaware of the first step his father took in the difficult, complicated process that drew him back to Atlanta. In the spring of 1922, Ernest traveled around Georgia buying up all the Coca-Cola stock he could find, preparing for the showdown with his Wall Street partners for control of the company. He picked up a few blocks of Coca-Cola stock here and there, some of them in the form of the specialty.
During the past two years, the company purged many of the men who were loyal to Sam Dobbs. This was the second time that Ernest Woodruff had planned to push her husband out of his rightful place as president of the Coca-Cola Company, and she was not going along. William served as corporate secretary of the Coca-Cola Company until the previous fall, when he resigned in the wake of Ernest Woodruff's victorious showdown with the New York interests.
In his first days as president of the Coca-Cola Company, Bob Woodruff did what many new CEOs do. His first goal was to restore one of the company's greatest assets, its secret formula, to the position he believed it deserved. There was one other area of the company's business that drew Drew Woodruff's keen interest: advertising.
He and D'Arcy had just returned from a business trip to Atlanta, where they met with Howard Candler and the other top buyers of the Coca-Cola Company. It wasn't just the technical excellence of the ad, although that was certainly a factor. The familiar script of the company's logo is almost always rendered in white on a red background.
SHORT SALES
And he approved the use of beet sugar (instead of sugar cane) as a sweetener in Coca-Cola sold abroad, allowing the company to save money by taking advantage of the cheap, bountiful crops that flourished in the beet fields after the war from Europe. But in many ways – especially by the standards of sophistication that characterize the Coca-Cola Company's international operations today – the State Department was a decidedly amateurish operation. By the spring of 1927, Ernest's holdings of Coca-Cola stock had increased in value to more than $4 million, making him one of the richest men in Atlanta.
As long as Woodruff remained with the Coca-Cola Company, he would be subject to the whims of his father. However, despite all the signs pointing to a downturn, Coca-Cola's sales quickly recovered, as did the company's share prices. Ernest had traded Coca-Cola stock up and down since the day he bought the company nine years earlier, but he had never taken a risk as dangerous as Robert's.
In the last days of 1927 and the early winter of 1928, Ernest and some of the other major Coca-Cola stockholders in the Trust Company took steps to stake Coca-Cola stock, apparently with the idea of to lower the price and save Robert. . Instead of falling, as he predicted, Coca-Cola's stock price mysteriously began to rise. In early March 1928, as the price of common Coca-Cola reached $130 a share and began to move toward $140, the Wall Street financial press became curious about all the inexplicable activity.
The source of all the short selling, Hopkins told the Atlanta Constitution, was insiders at the Trust Company, who planned to "deflate" the price of Coca-Cola stock for their own benefit. Until now, Ernest and his allies at the Trust Company had disposed of very little of their actual holdings of Coca-Cola stock. Goddard, its message was clear: Ernest Woodruff's crowd—the insiders—intended to get out of the Coca-Cola Company entirely and were assembling an attractive package that would place control of the company in the hands of anyone, who were interested in buying from them.
Bradley, the chairman of the board of directors of the Coca-Cola Company, did not sign it.
