Word: sodas
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...same old-favorite brands year after year. Now suddenly the liquor, beer and wine companies seem to have hit on the right formula for keeping their customers in a drinking mood. They have decided to win over the members of the baby-boom generation, who were raised on soda pop and feel no compulsion to acquire a taste for Scotch, with an outpouring of wine and liquor coolers, fruity cordials, sparkling wines and cocktails...
Michael Crete and R. Stuart Bewley, two entrepreneurs in Lodi, Calif., helped get the wave rolling when they invented California Cooler in 1981, taking their recipe from traditional beach-party punches made of white wine, fruit juice and soda. By the time they sold their business last September to Louisville's Brown-Forman distillers for $146 million, more than 75 imitators had appeared on the scene. This year an estimated 70 million cases of wine coolers will be sold, up some 72% from 1985, making a total market of more than $1.2 billion...
...regular wine. "We're showing people they can still have a good time partying and not get blown away," says Chuck Blank, marketing manager for California Cooler. Yet another selling point is perceived . healthfulness, even though most coolers have as many calories as a similar- size can of regular soda. The beverage appeals particularly to women, who buy about 70% of all coolers sold, yet it has managed to escape the stigma of wimpiness...
...ultimate instance of American mixed feelings. Our popular culture? Spiffy, spectacular: Billie Holiday songs, Krazy Kat, Preston Sturges movies, Ernie Kovacs, the Four Tops, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Bob Dylan, E.T., even blue jeans, Whoppers and soda pop. But ask again, on a dull, gray, Spenglerian day, and the view is altogether different. Alarming, appalling, totally awesome. The critic Dwight Macdonald called pop culture a spreading ooze back in the 1950s, when Sylvester Stallone was still just a boy. Today America's righteous pop thug is huge, ubiquitous, swaggering from one medium into the next and the next...
Liquor store merchants benefit as much as anyone else from the week's festivities. "It's a fairly hectic week with lots of parties," said Clifton M. Thuma '78, manager of Harvard Provision Company. Seniors begin "primarily with beer, vodka, ice, wine-coolers, and soda," said Thuma. "When Commencement week brings mom and dad in town, it's scotch, bourbon, and very good cognacs...