In 1992, the Philippines was a country where roughly one in three people lived below the poverty line. The average Filipino family earned around $100 a month. Against that backdrop, Pepsi launched a promotion called Number Fever.
The concept was simple. Buy a Pepsi, check the three-digit number printed inside the bottle cap, and if it matched the winning number announced on television that night, you could win up to one million pesos, around $40,000, nearly 33 years of the average family’s income in a single bottle cap.
Half the country played. Families hoarded caps. Kids dug through garbage cans looking for them. People fought in the streets over found caps. The campaign was so popular Pepsi extended it by five weeks.
Then came May 25, 1992.
The winning number was announced on the evening news: 349. Across the Philippines, people checked their caps and screamed. Tens of thousands had 349. Then hundreds of thousands. A computer glitch at a bottling plant had printed the grand prize number on between 600,000 and 800,000 caps, instead of the intended two.
Paying everyone would have cost Pepsi $32 billion. The entire GDP of the Philippines that year was $52 billion.
Pepsi refused to pay. Instead they offered each cap holder around $20 as a goodwill gesture. Some accepted. Many didn’t.
The rage that followed was unlike anything a soft drink company had ever faced. More than 35 Pepsi trucks were overturned and set on fire. Molotov cocktails were thrown through the windows of Pepsi offices. Executives hired bodyguards. One said they were “eating death threats for breakfast.” Five people died.
22,000 people filed lawsuits. The case went all the way to the Philippine Supreme Court, which ruled in Pepsi’s favor in 2006, fourteen years after the incident.
In the Philippines, to be “349ed” became slang for being deceived by someone who should have kept their promise.
Pepsi Accidentally Printed Hundreds of Thousands of Winning Caps and Sparked National Chaos
