Corporations Who Don’t Want You Reading Their Web Site

This is kind of amusing. There used to be a set of hilarious pages at this URL: http://customer.coca-cola.com/html/olivegard_article_ss.html bragging about the Olive Garden’s success at getting customers to order Coke rather than water.

Then the link got most to Metafilter and a number of other places, and apparently somebody at Coke decided they didn’t want the average weblogger making fun of them anymore.

The description itself was a hilarious example of the sort of “promotional” programs that businesses like that are always trying to convince their employees to buy into. Calling it H2NO, the idea was to get the server to rundown the list of wonderful Coca Cola products they could purchase, which of course sounds a lot more exciting than the tap water (in fact the last time I ate at Olive Garden, this was the first thing the waitress did after the usual pleasantries — told me every single soft drink I could order).

Of course my wife thinks my solution to these sorts of things is a bit extreme — I order exactly the same thing at restaurants every time I return. Name a restaurant and my wife can tell you exactly what I will order, because having to constantly look over menus, etc., is a real time waster (and a pox on those restaurants that insist on varying their menus from time to time).

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